Killer app answers: Is it safe to let your child suck a rubber duck?

A few short years ago, if you wanted to do any home improvement your were limited in your ability to find healthy stuff. In fact, with little product oversight, consumers where in the dark about whether anything from paint to plastic baby bottles contained toxic materials.

As parents we were unaware that our babies bottles were filled with BPA. As drivers we were unaware that our cars were filled with smelly, off-gassing chemicals that were harmful to our health. As homeowners we were unaware that our cabinets, furniture, and garden hoses were filled with cancer-causing formaldehyde, toxic flame retardants, and lead.

Aided by the rising concerns of toxic materials in children's products, www.HealthyStuff.org began providing results of independent scientific tests for hazardous chemicals in thousands of consumer products. They found the presence of chemicals that are linked to serious diseases, like cancer, and to ecological damage. For years, this has been a helpful tool to provide information to the public and has helped influence retailers.

This month, HealthyStuff.org launched a new game-changing tool to help you encourage retailers to phase out the toxic products and remove them from their shelves for good. As part of the national Mind the Store campaign, HealthyStuff created the Retail Center with test results from products from over a dozen of the nation's leading retailers.

Click on "Best Buy" and you'll find a pair of noise isolating ear buds that contain off-the-charts levels of lead. Click on "Target" and you'll find that the cute little pink bracelet you were about to buy your four-year-old daughter is filled with lead, cadmium, arsenic, bromine, and tin. If HealthyStuff didn't test this for you, you'd have no way of knowing what was in these products. You have a right to know.

Photo credit to www.HealthyStuff.org

The Retail Center let's you search by retailer to identify both hazardous and low-hazard products. Now you can shop informed. You have a choice whether to buy your child that rubber ducky with a chemical known to cause breast cancer and has been banned for use in children's products in the EU since 1999. Knowledge is freedom.

To find out how you can help retailers phase out these toxic products from their shelves, visit Mind the Store, a national campaign taking action against the nation's top 10 retailers to reduce the prevalence of toxic chemicals in consumer products.