Baby Green Genes Marketplace

Birth Defects Research for Children, Inc (BRCI), has launched the Baby Green Genes Marketplace. It is a place to find “green, safer, earth-friendly and organic alternatives for the products you need to take care of your family, home and garden."


BRCI is a nonprofit that runs the nation's only birth-defects registry, but over the last couple of years they have begun focusing on prevention, with their Healthy Baby Resources. The Baby Green Genes Marketplace is an outgrowth of that effort. "We want to provide people with positive steps they can take for themselves and their children," Betty Mekdeci of BRCI says.

There are products, in dozens of categories, ranging from accessories to water purification. Each product listed on the site has been approved by BRCI staff as having met certain minimum criteria for health and environmental safety. One example that Betty gave of the great alternative products that are on the market is a sugar-based product that can be used to control lice. Lice B Gone uses natural sugar enzymes, which dissolve the sticky substance that holds lice nits in hair. As Betty said, "Who really wants to dunk their child's head in pesticides?" (There is also a similar, sugar-based product that's effective for flea's and ticks.)