Exposure Risk Assessment Of Heavy Metals And Phthalates In Five Types Of Toys

Heavy metals, phthalates and flame retardants in toys have been regarded as a serious threat to children’s health. Although the content limit of chemicals in toys has been paid attention to and some test standards have been regulated for toys in China, but the tracking and monitoring work on phthalates remain lack.Five types of toys such as plush toys, plastic toys, jewelry toys, wooden toys, paper toys in market were selected for this study. The GC-MS and ICP-OES methods were adopted to measure the contents and speciation distribution of 8 kinds of heavy metals and 6 kinds of phthalates in toy samples.Results indicated that the detection rate and content of heavy metals and phthalates of plush toy were all the lowest compared with those of other four types of toys. As for plastic toys, the detection rates of phthalates were the highest and the average contents of phthalates were the largest which reached 13068.5mg/kg. The further analysis of species showed that DEHP occupy a dominant state. The detection rate and content of adornment toys were comparable to those of wooden toys which were all in the middle position. Overall, the detection rate of heavy metals was higher than that of phthalates while the content of phthalates was higher than that of metals in toys. Through comparing with contents of heavy metals and phthalates indoor and ourdoor airborne particles, indoor particulate phthalates contents were higher than those in outdoor particles while the heavy metals were in the opposite trend. Some phthalates content in some toys were found to have higher value than that in indoor particles.In this study the exposure dose of DEHP by three pathways including error gulp, mouth contact and dermal contact were calculated and compared. Considering different features of children in different ages, the daily exposure of children under 3 years is significantly stronger than that of children withinother age range. In particular, those children who may swallow toys will faced with the higher risk. If only normal toy play style was considered and the risk due to error gulp was excluded, the risk index of chemicals in toys represented by DEHP was less than one. Therefore, except error gulp, the risk due to exposure to detected types of toys will not exhibit a significant risk for children’s health. Compared with the content in the indoor particles and potential release rate from toysto the environment of DHEP, the potential contribution to indoor air DHEP of another four types of toys,except plastic toys, are very low. While the plastic toys have higher PAEs content and potential contribution to the indoor air DHEP, the risk due to PAEs is not neglected and will become the key point for monitoring.