Toxic car seats

[Timoffshore]

Can anyone recommend a non toxic chemical car seat ?

bought maxi cosi pebble 360 pro after reviews here and elsewhere only to read the actual ADAC report in German to find the seat failed due to high levels of toxic pollutants in the materials . Not sure what ADAC report this site review (and others) was looking at . Seat also failed the German consumer site Stiftung Warentest review .

having then looked at other car seats it’s quite crazy to see how many companies seem quite happy to use carcinogenic and other toxic chemicals in their seats .

It never crossed my mind that a car seat might be toxic.

I took a look at the ADAC website and the reviews of the Maxi Cosi (we used to have one so interesting) and what is nuts is that different models have different ratings for toxicity. Which either means that different models are using different materials or processes, or that despite using the same material and processes there is a variation that means the models actually used in the tests had different levels of toxicity.

I have read one article in the Spiegel on this, but I am guessing as it is new test, from the ADAC at least, manufacturers have not had time to respond yet. It's actually a hard decision, the seats kind of need to be flame retardant and flame retardants are toxic.

As I said, I had no idea, so thanks for posting this. I'm guessing a sensible middle road is to minimize direct skin contact.

There's actually no requirement for car seat fabrics to be flame retardant, at least not in the car seat regulations. Flame retardants are basically only useful in the context of something like a dropped cigarette or an overheated electric cable, they don't have any use in a catastrophic scenario like a vehicle fire.

The UK on the other hand requires any kind of "furniture" to be treated with flame retardants in order to be compliant with a fire safety regulation. Because infant car seats are commonly compatible with a pushchair they are classed as "prams" which is a type of bed and therefore comes under that regulation. This causes an issue with looking at ADAC results for this because companies trading in the EU will have a slightly different model for the EU and the UK market and ADAC are based in Germany therefore they test the version of the seat available on the German market, which is different to the UK one.

This only applies to the infant stage. Once you get to car seats which stay in the car they are no longer "furniture" and the EU/UK versions are the same.

It's also why Which? don't use the "Schadstoffe" score when they buy the ADAC scores to give their ratings - they only look at the crash testing and ease of use etc. (Stiftung Warentest do use this because they are based in Germany).

TBH a lot of people also find the ADAC test results in this specific area to be very dubious and/or irrelevant which is why they only look at the crash testing score and ignore everything else. Some brands who have received poor ratings for this in the past have put out a statement about it, you might find this minimising or interesting. The way that they test it is to take some of the fibres from the cover and put them into a chemical solution and then they test that solution - it's not really clear whether that is something that would equate to babies being at risk from these chemicals. But Germans in general are very keen on being "natural" and tend to worry about this kind of thing, more so than a lot of EU countries. I live in Germany and was amused to see that the baby monitor we bought has a section about EMF safety only in the German language section of the instructions - apparently other nations don't consider this a frequent enough worry to include it.

If you do have concerns about these things - Nuna do have an infant seat where the cover is made of wool and naturally flame retardant therefore it doesn't have the chemicals in the cover. They are compatible with most of the common pram adapters.

There used to be a poster on MN who posted quite regularly about the flame retardant law in the UK and how it gets applied to prams and car seats, their posting name was "FlameIngSofa" with that spelling, so if you google or advanced search it will probably bring up their threads, though I expect any car seat recommendations will now be out of date.

Actually it’s a U.S. requirement based on an outdated federal law from 1972 . As the U.S. is the largest market and most of these products are made in China I doubt many manufactures use different materials for different markets ?

The ADAC report and German consumer report was quite specific . Maybe Which needs to also look at the materials used in more depth .

Time magazine did an expose on multiple manufactures of child car seats a couple of years ago too after a quick Google search .

maxi cosi have issued a statement admitting that the materials used in the airbag warning label are toxic and have issued a report from a Dutch chemicals company (convenient for a Dutch company) claiming that the level of toxicity is within acceptable ranges for humans provided the baby doesn’t lick or touch it constantly .

the label is large and right next to the babies head

a newborn human toxicity tolerance is zero

it’s clear that more needs to be done on reviews to include the issue of toxic materials along with the obvious focus on mechanical safety .

The US and European car seat regulations are hugely different so yes, they are using different materials even when the companies are making them in the same factories.

The UK allows car seats according to ECE R44 or R129. The rest of Europe only use R129 now so the majority of models sold in the UK conform to R129, which has no requirement for flame retardants.

However the UK law something like 1988 furnishings regulation does mandate the use of flame retardants, which crosses over with infant car seats.

I can assure you they have separate models with different materials. I used to work in the industry, in Germany. They have slightly different model numbers for the models sold in the UK. Technically they are identical but the fabrics are different.