Plastic exposure is fast becoming another social determinant of child health

A local councillor summed up the danger: "We don't know what chemicals could be in these bottles, and obviously that prolonged contact with a baby's mouth could cause issues." He is right to worry, but this story highlights something far more pervasive than one seizure of black-market goods.

One of us has spent most of a career as a respiratory paediatrician working on air pollution, an issue at the heart of child health inequality. Children in the most deprived neighbourhoods breathe the dirtiest air and end up in hospital far more often. It is why Ian set up the UK's first dedicated Clean Air Clinic.

Infant exposure to toxic chemicals from everyday products follows the same pattern: harm correlating directly with a parent's ability to afford safer alternatives. Yet the framing of stories like Hull’s troubles us: the implication that illegal bottles are dangerous and legal ones are safe, when the councillor's fears apply just as much to many 'compliant' plastic products.

Over 16,000 chemicals are used in plastics, more than 4,200 of them hazardous, yet only around six percent are regulated anywhere. Every bottle in one study of twenty brands released bisphenols, including "BPA-free" products, and even the lowest-leaching dummies in a recent study exceeded safe daily bisphenol limits by up to 50-fold. Exposure begins even before birth, through the placenta.

Infants are uniquely vulnerable: immature metabolic and immune systems mean toxins accumulate at proportionally greater levels than in adults. The first 1,000 days, when organs form and hormones choreograph development, are precisely the window that endocrine-disrupting chemicals threaten to derail.

We recently joined experts in endocrinology, toxicology, nutrition and food-packaging science in Parliament to launch PlasticFree Babies, a national campaign to protect the first 1,000 days, and together we briefed parliamentarians on this evidence.

The public is ahead of the politicians. More than 8 in 10 parents want government action to reduce babies' exposure to plastic chemicals, yet fewer than half are aware these products can release harmful chemicals at all.

Britain is not short of powers, only coherence. Food-contact rules, product-safety law and UK REACH each cover fragments of a baby's world, but none treats the first 1,000 days as a single exposure window, so a banned substance could be simply swapped for a near-identical cousin. The European Union has banned bisphenols in food-contact materials; Britain has yet to set a date for its own.

PlasticFree Babies therefore calls first for a cross-government call for evidence, uniting the latest science with industry expertise on scaling safer alternatives without raising costs for families. That should pave the way for phased bans of the highest-risk items such as plastic feeding bottles and teethers, mandatory testing, and clear labelling. The Environmental Protection Act restricted plastic straws and cotton buds; if we can act on straws, we can act on toxic products our babies hold in their mouths for hours each day.

Just like air pollution, inequality sits at the heart of this issue. How can a family on the breadline pay twice as much for a safer bottle made of steel or glass? And no parent should have to dissect the chemical makeup of a product to know it is safe; its place on the shop shelf ought to be assurance enough. Safety should never come at a premium, yet through regulatory laziness our leaders have allowed infant health to become a high-ticket item.

A baby's first bottle should be the safest product in the house. Until that is true for the poorest child in Hull as much as the wealthiest in Harrogate, the chasm of health inequality will continue to widen.

Baroness Boycott is a crossbench peer and Dr Ian Sinha is an Honorary Professor of Child Health at the University of Liverpool

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