Californians this summer are starting to see a new warning at checkout lines of grocery stores, pharmacies and convenience markets that the products on their shelves may include a dangerous chemical.
But there’s one problem: The signs don’t tell them which products.
The chemical is bisphenol A, commonly known as BPA. California officials and a committee of experts have concluded that the chemical is a toxic substance harmful to women’s reproductive health and should be added to the state’s toxic chemical right-to-know law, enacted by voters in 1986 when they passed Proposition 65. While BPA has already been banned in sippy cups and baby bottles, it is used regularly in a variety of products.
The state’s new warning reads: “Many food and beverage cans have linings containing bisphenol A (BPA), a chemical known to the State of California to cause harm to the female reproductive system. Jar lids and bottle lids may also contain BPA. You can be exposed to BPA when you consume foods or beverages packaged in these containers.”
For people who really do want to avoid BPA, the warnings also include a URL to the state health agency’s website (www.P65Warnings.ca.gov/BPA), where smartphone-carrying shoppers can scroll through fact sheets in multiple languages.
But without further digging, there’s no way to know it’s in everything from water bottles to baked bean cans. The ubiquitous chemical has been used for decades to harden plastics, especially in food and beverage packaging. It’s also in some kinds of paper receipts and in epoxy resins used to line food cans and water supply pipes.
The fuzzy warning — the result of a hard-won exception by the chemical industry– comes after years of debate between health officials and the industry.
BPA is just the latest addition to Proposition 65, which lists about 800 chemicals. It’s also among the largest, and it’s the only one to have received an exception that allows generic warnings near cash registers rather than on the products themselves, said Sam Delson, the state health agency’s deputy director for legislative affairs. Delson said the exception is temporary and is expected to expire by the end of 2017. What will replace the “emergency regulation,” however, is still unclear.
Like almost all things involving BPA, the temporary exception has proved controversial and could be considered a lobbying coup for the chemical and plastics industry, which previously tried to sue the state over the chemical’s listing.
“Prop. 65 has done a remarkably good job of getting toxic chemicals out of products and out of the manufacturing process,” said Caroline Cox, research director at the Center for Environmental Health in Oakland. But the exception to the regulation weakens the law, she said.
Over the past decade, BPA became as politicized as genetically modified foods. Numerous studies with conflicting findings over the years turned BPA into a contentious chemical among the public and scientists.
Scientists raised issues about its possible contribution to fetal developmental problems and its effects on babies, further adding to the controversy and raising the stakes. Following Canada’s lead, the U.S. Food and Drug Administration eventually banned its use in baby bottles, sippy cups and infant formula packaging.
Federal agencies favor studies that follow standards known as Good Laboratory Practices. These work like a cookbook recipe for how certain experiments should be done, with the goal of producing health studies that aren’t biased or incomplete. That’s the way industry-funded studies are done. But that means that when the FDA and Environmental Protection Agency rely only on Good Laboratory Practices studies, they’re ignoring independent research by university scientists.
So the results have been mixed: Industry-supported studies find minimal health effects of BPA exposure, while most publicly funded research finds significant effects, even at low doses.
The American Chemistry Council has extensively participated in the regulatory process on the federal and state levels. The group spends hundreds of millions of dollars lobbying Congress every year, led by companies that include Dow Chemical, DuPont, Exxon Mobil, Bayer, 3M and Honeywell. Some industry lobbyists focus exclusively on California and the Proposition 65 listings.
The trade group has also tried to influence scientific work. For example, it financially supports the Harvard Center for Risk Analysis, which published a much-criticized report assessing the safety of BPA a decade ago. American Chemistry Council-funded scientists seek out studies finding BPA health effects and publish rebuttals to them–if editors don’t notice the conflict of interest.
University scientists are not immune to conflicts of interests either. For the sake of their jobs and funding sources, scientists experience pressure to publish frequently — and it’s easier to gain attention publishing findings indicating health risks rather than no implications for public health.
The American Chemistry Council challenged the Proposition 65 listing in court in 2013, forcing the Office of Environmental Health Hazard Assessment to delist BPA. But in 2014, a Sacramento County Superior Court judge ruled that the industry’s opposition was “misinformed and confused.”
The council denied repeated requests for interviews.
On May 11, 2015, the state health agency unanimously approved listing the chemical, citing its toxicity to the female reproductive system. After a one-year grace period, producers and retailers are now having to come into compliance with the law.
While consumers continue to struggle to figure out what products are safe, scientists and regulators continue to evaluate the health effects of BPA and related chemicals.
Scientists at IBM’s Almaden Research Center in San Jose announced last week that they have created plastics that remain durable without leaching BPA while decomposing.
Other researchers are studying alternative chemicals, such as Tritan and bisphenol S, which may or may not have similar health effects as BPA.
“We’re replacing BPA with chemicals we know little about,” said L. Earl Gray, an EPA toxicologist.
WHAT’S BPA?
Bisphenol A, commonly referred to as BPA, was originally developed as an artificial estrogen, mimicking the female sex hormone. The chemical can interfere with the signals hormones carry, disrupting the body’s communication networks in reproductive, brain and immune systems.
Based on studies that baby bottles and sippy cups leach synthetic hormones that could affect the brain, behavior and prostate gland of fetuses and infants, the Food and Drug Administration has banned its use in those products.
Scientists have studied extremely high exposure to BPA and found that it can make people more susceptible to birth defects, physical deformities and cancer. Such exposure is much higher than people typically get from BPA in food cans and plastic containers, but some researchers argue that low exposure to the chemical also poses health risks.
