Sears and Kmart will reduce or eliminate a popular plastic linked to serious health problems from packaging and merchandise in their 3,800 stores - an action announced Wednesday after more than a year of talks with environmental and shareholder groups.

The plastic, polyvinyl chloride, or PVC, is often mixed with phthalates, a family of plasticizers that some scientists suspect causes early puberty in girls, impaired sperm quality in men and genital defects.

In October, California followed the lead of the European Union and outlawed certain phthalates in many products for babies and toddlers starting in 2009.

By saying that its Sears and Kmart stores would phase out PVC - found in a broad array of items including packaging, water pipes, children's toys and baby bibs - Sears Holdings Corp. is following the lead of Wal-Mart Stores Inc. and Target Corp.

Almost all vinyl products are made with PVC, and PVC is the only plastic that uses phthalates as a softener, said Michael Schade, PVC campaign coordinator for the Center for Health, Environment and Justice, which has been pressing Sears and other companies to replace the substance.

"We're either at or approaching a tipping point for the use of PVC in packaging and products at major retailing chains in the U.S.," said Richard Liroff, executive director at the Investor Environmental Health Network. The nonprofit network is a consortium of money managers and shareholder groups that uses stock holdings to pressure companies on chemical issues.

Schade said the trend by retailers to cut back or stop using PVC was started overseas about 10 years ago by IKEA, a European retailer of household goods that eliminated the plastic from all of its packaging and products, including furniture, toys and shower curtains.

Sears, based in Hoffman Estates, Ill., did not set a timeline for meeting its PVC goals, saying it depends in part on availability of replacement materials and suppliers' willingness to act.

Sears said it plans to:

"Identify safer, more sustainable and cost-effective alternatives to PVC" and use those when designing and making private-label merchandise.

Urge its vendors to reduce or eliminate PVC in products and packaging.

Label merchandise as PVC-free when appropriate.

Use PVC-free materials when possible.

Sears has been feeling heat from environmental groups since March 2006, when more than 50 environmental organizations wrote the $50 billion retailer urging it to eliminate PVC. The groups, led by the Center for Health, Environment and Justice, noted that in addition to the problems for consumers, toxic materials are used as the raw material to make PVC, causing health problems for workers and communities near the plants where the plastic is produced.

Schade said Sears was immediately receptive to the complaints.

"They expressed a significant willingness to act, which is why we didn't launch a public campaign against them," Schade said.

Several months after talks began, the Evangelical Lutheran Church in America filed a resolution urging Sears to prepare a report on its "practices related to social, environmental and economic sustainability." That resolution was withdrawn when the company agreed to talks on its PVC policies.

Sears spokesman Chris Brathwaite said the groups did not force Sears to act.

"I wouldn't call it pressure," Brathwaite said. "This was a topic that was brought to our attention. "We obviously agreed . . . otherwise we wouldn't have done this."

As part of a recent Journal Sentinel investigation of the government's regulation of hormone-mimicking chemicals such as phthalates, the newspaper asked Frederick vom Saal, an expert in the field, to audit a suburban Milwaukee home for the presence of the potentially toxic chemicals. Vom Saal, a biology professor at the University of Missouri, found PVC and phthalates in the home's vinyl flooring, water pipes and children's toys, such as rubber ducks and dolls.

"Chewing on a vinyl toy is like sucking on a toxic lollipop," said Schade, of the Center for Health, Environment and Justice.

Vom Saal suggested that people avoid PVC by buying wooden toys or those labeled "PVC free" and that they install water filters on taps.