Your Baby's Clothes & Gear

One of the easiest baby categories to green over is clothing and gear, in part because you may have been using eco-friendly practices without even realizing it. The mounds of hand-me-down onesies, blankets and sleepers that you get from friends or family members? They're green, not only because you're re-using them, but also because the more frequently previous users washed the items, the fewer chemicals remain on them.

The Best Clothes for Baby

Conventional cotton clothing can be a confusing environmental hot-button topic, says Lynda Fassa, founder of Green Babies, one of the world's largest organic cotton clothing companies, and the author of Green Babies, Sage Moms. While conventional cotton takes up only about three percent of the world's farmland, it uses up a quarter of the world's chemical pesticides and fertilizers. The Environmental Protection Agency reports that nearly half of the top 15 pesticides used on conventional cotton crops in this country are "likely" or "known" carcinogens. "The junk that we're dumping in agriculture is being used on cotton," Fassa says. "So a very small garment makes a dramatic difference in terms of the quality of life for farm workers and farmers, and on the quality of the soil, which is an ecosystem of its own."

Health-wise, it's debatable whether pesticide residue remains on cotton garments once they reach your home. The danger, Fassa says, comes in the fabric finishes – which often include formaldehyde and other carcinogens and neurotoxins, flame retardants and the heavy metals used to color a garment, which could have an impact on a child if the manufacturer hasn't used the chemical fixer properly to keep the dye in the garment. (Fassa notes that dark green dyes typically contain more heavy metals than other colors; in this case, green is bad!) "Mother Nature does not want to make a garment deep purple and keep it that way," she says. "Generally speaking, natural is better."

In an ideal world, your baby's clothing and fabric accessories would be made of untreated, certified 100 percent organic cotton with no toxic fabric finishes. But whom are we kidding? An exclusively organic layette can be relatively expensive and more difficult to find than conventional items, and friends and family members who can't resist buying baby clothes might not know or want to stick to organic materials. 

But authorities on organic living say you can work around those challenges. If you have to limit organic clothing to a few items, spend your quota on snug-fitting organic pajamas, which will get the most wear. Interior designer Kimberly Rider, author of Organic Baby, also recommends purchasing organic items – t-shirts, onesies, diapers – that can be layered underneath conventional clothes so that the chemicals don't come into direct contact with the baby's skin. 

Green Gear for a Healthy, Happy Baby

Odds are pretty good that along with the piles of baby clothes, you're going to acquire more baby gear than you ever dreamed necessary.  Unfortunately, most gear is made of plastics, and with plastics come possibly harmful chemicals.