Bloom Silicone Catch Bib

Details

The meal-time bib, for once solids are properly under way and most of the food is going somewhere other than the mouth. Moulded in one piece, with a pocket deep enough to hold its own shape. Start with the label everybody prints. BPA-free, on a silicone bib, tells you nothing at all. BPA and BPS are polycarbonate and epoxy chemistry; silicone is a polysiloxane and has never contained either, so there is nothing here to have removed and nothing to have quietly substituted. It is a true sentence that carries no information, which is what makes it worth naming. What actually separates one silicone bib from another is the cure system and what was mixed into it, and neither ever appears on a pack. The cure first. This is platinum-cured, which means addition curing with a platinum catalyst and no by-products left in the rubber. The cheap route is peroxide curing, which leaves cure residues such as dichlorobenzoic acid behind and needs a long post-cure bake to drive them off. Skipping that bake is where the faint chemical smell on a cheap silicone article comes from. So the replacement is named: platinum catalyst in place of a peroxide initiator, and a volatile content below 0.5 percent after four hours at 200 C to show it worked. The filler second. Silicone is expensive, calcium carbonate is not, and bulking silicone with chalk is common and invisible. Two ways to catch it. In a laboratory, calcium by ICP-MS: ours reads below 0.1 percent. At your kitchen table, twist a corner hard. Filled silicone goes white along the fold. This one does not.

• One moulded piece: no seams, no stitching, no fabric lining, nothing bonded on
• Platinum-cured liquid silicone rubber, 60 Shore A, so the pocket stays open instead of collapsing flat
• Volatile content below 0.5 percent after 4 hours at 200 C, the standard measure of a properly cured silicone
• No calcium carbonate filler. Calcium below 0.1 percent by ICP-MS, and it does not go white when you twist it
• Overall migration below 10 mg per square decimetre into 3 percent acetic acid and 50 percent ethanol, 2 hours at 100 C, run on the finished bib with its neck fastener attached, not on the raw pellet
• Migration of certain elements to IS 9873 Part 3: all nineteen below the limit of quantification
• Colour is inorganic pigment dispersed through the silicone, not printed on the surface, so it cannot rub or chew off
• Adjustable neck in four positions, 22 cm to 30 cm, fastened by a moulded button and hole in the same single piece. No clip, no popper, no small part
• Holds -40 C to 220 C, so it takes a dishwasher, a steam steriliser and five minutes of boiling without changing
• Honest trade-off: haldi will tint it, and no silicone resists that. An hour in sunlight lifts most of it. A tinted bib has not failed, it is stained
• Honest disposal position: silicone is not biodegradable, is not compostable, and no kerbside stream in India takes it. The argument for it is length of life, not end of life. This bib should last through two or three children, and when it finally tears it goes to landfill. We would rather say that than put a leaf on the pack