divine green: Sustainable Home, Beauty, & Lifestyle

Organic baby clothing companies are growing up. Speesees a San Francisco-based maker of fair-trade and organic cotton clothes for infants to (terrible) two-year-olds, has expanded this spring to include spunky-designed dresses and jumpers for kids up to 4 years. Speesees (after the way a child might say “species”) is an artful collection of animal-printed clothes that prove “green” doesn’t have to be crunchy. And the cotton is good for babies with sensitive skin.

Surely the move caters to more demand from eco-aware parents. When Speesees founder Rachel Pearson started designing her first onesie in 2003, there was very little in the way of cute, organic-cotton clothing to buy her friends raising families. But in recent years her business has exploded, with sales into more than 250 stores around the world, including Whole Foods, and through a newly redesigned Web site. (Roughly 15 percent of the company’s sales are directly from the Web.)

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After the kids grow up (or grow out of whatever fit last month), parents are left with a glut of stuff—Baby Bjorns, cradle swings, snuglis. Some parents hand down the bounty to friends or family, while others store the goods in the basement (just in case). But a growing group of parents are turning to grassroots Web sites to unload unwanted items and alleviate their consumer guilt.

Zwaggle.com, which I wrote about here, is a social network designed to let parents donate baby goods to others in need. In exchange for charity, that member will earn points to pick up something else from another parent. Members pay only for shipping for their desired item.

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One of the more inspiring companies I visited with at the Green Festival in San Francisco last weekend was Green to Grow, a Los Angeles-based maker of bisphenol A-free baby bottles.

Bisphenol A (BPA) is a chemical unknown to most shoppers, but it’s a component of a polycarbonate plastic that comprises most clear baby bottles on the market today. Environmental studies have shown that BPA can disrupt neurological and reproductive hormones in children, causing illnesses such as attention deficit disorder and early onset puberty. Separately, researchers have shown that the toxicant, under pressure from heat and kitchen cleaning brushes, can leach out from the plastic into the bottle.

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