A few months after P. B. came into our lives, hoping to shift my daughters’ affections away from it and towards something else, I bought Vivie a new doll for Christmas. After combing through a catalog full of “natural” products in search of the anti-P.B., I spotted a cloth baby I thought she would like, a pudgy pink-cheeked cherub named Erik, made by a Swedish brand called Rubens Barn. When he showed up in the mail a few weeks before Christmas, it was all I could do not to carry him around the house on my hip: He’s squishy and plush, with fleece skin and curly brown hair, and he’s hefty and weighted like a real baby, with a padded bottom.

Like P.B., Erik was popular with Vivie for about three weeks after Christmas. Midway through January, he went under her bed to live with the family of stuffed animals, broken toys, and dust bunnies that had taken up residence there.

So how did I get to hacking at P.B.’s leg with a chisel? Soon after Vivie’s infatuation with Erik faded, I began wondering why, exactly, I had such a strong preference for one doll over the other and why I had hoped that my daughter would, too. I didn’t like that P.B. was plastic—but was it because it looked cheap and disposable, or because I thought that meant the doll was somehow bad for the environment? Was I being a snob, or just a consumer with good intentions? Magic Cabin, the catalog I ordered Erik from, says the company is making a “conscious effort to protect the environment.” It plants two seedlings for every tree used to create its catalogs. It’s the kind of business I felt good about supporting; Hasbro, which made P.B., doesn’t offer that same sort of feel-good consumerism.

At the simplest level, I preferred Erik over P.B. because he represented the kind of object I wanted to see in my living space. At some point my vision of happiness began to include this idea of sustainability—that much of whatever we bought or acquired needed to last, to stick around long enough to be traded or passed on. Otherwise, it qualified as junk.

But as a parent and as a consumer, it can be hard to look past words like “natural” and “organic,” to understand why even the products that carry those labels may not necessarily be as environmentally friendly as they’ve been branded. I buy wax-paper bags instead of plastic ones because it intuitively seems like the more sustainable choice; press me for details, though, and my answer would be a little fuzzy.

So after a while, I started second-guessing my basic reactions to the dolls, wondering whether my feelings were valid or a result of naïveté. To find out, I took P.B. and Erik to the office of David Tyler, a University of Oregon chemistry professor who studies the life cycles of goods and materials, looking at the sustainability of products through various lenses, like toxicity and carbon footprint. Tyler started conducting these assessments while teaching a class on sustainability at the university, and is now a common guest at “science pubs” around the country, gatherings and informal lectures in bars where people can have a drink and ask questions of a scientist. Tyler’s science pubs often focus on the environmental impact of everyday products, and I thought he might be able to tell me if I was correct in assuming that Erik, rather than P.B., was the more environmentally friendly of the two.