Implications of BPA in Paper Receipts
http://thedianerehmshow.org/shows/2010-07-28/implications-bpa-paper-receipts
Federal regulators have expressed concern over BPA in food and beverage containers. Now an environmental group finds the controversial chemical in a surprising source - paper receipts. The health risks of exposure to BPA.
Guests
Ken Cook
president, Environmental Working Group.
Meg Kissinger
reporter, Milwaukee Journal Sentinel.
Steven Hentges
senior director, Polycarbonate/BPA Global Group, the American Chemistry Council.
Comments
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I have mostly eliminated the use of plastics due to chemical leaching concerns like BPA (and also because they are derived from petroleum). I don't trust the industry-sponsored studies that determine that BPA is safe, and I believe the unintended consequences from the use of these chemicals in our supply chain is neither well-studied or understood. Companies have no incentive to abide by the precautionary principle, so I will act to lower my risk when possible.
This leads to a couple of questions--I have been putting my receipts in my compost pile. My compost is then used in my vegetable garden or put on the lawn. Would the BPA potentially end up in my vegetables or the water supply? The other options are to recycle or put receipts in the landfill. If receipts are recycled, could BPA end up in water and food containers again?
Moore Business Forms was hit with the largest fine under TSCA in the 1990s. The fine was $11.2 million for not disclosing toxic chemicals in carbonless copy paper. The fine was lowered for voluntarily coming forward and sworn testimony there were no known health complaints or ill end users of the paper. This was a lie. When EPA was pushed it was learned there were many law suits for personal injury from carbonless copy paper. Defendants were Appleton Papers, Mead, Moore Business Forms, Boise Casacde, Universal Paper and more. Many, many people have irreversible illness or are dead from innocently handling this paper. It is a scandal of huge proportion. It was later discovered thermal paper is as bad if not worse.
When you say that it is safe in the amounts most people are exposed to, the consumer, what about those that work in retail, touching reciepts all day at a cash register, or being a bank teller?! What about the people working in and living around the plants where bpa is being processed?!
Steve from ACC is part of a lobbying group that is involved in any kind of regulation imposed upon the industry he represents. I get their newsletter every day in the e-mail and therefore I know what work they are involved in. The things they are fighting against for e.g. are :
1. No city in the country should ban plastic bags. The reason they give is over time the cloth or reusable bags collect the organic matter from grocery stores and therefore have more germs than a plastic bag that does not decompose, ends up in the drains, in our waterways, in the fishes we eat and as a matter of fact never go away. Their argument is that we should encourage recycling instead of a total ban but at the same time they are opposed to any kind of a fee associated with the plastic bags that might force people to look for alternatives.
2. Also ACC is opposed to any kind of climate change regulation that affects utilities companies. Their argument is that chemical industry is very energy intensive and if they tax the utilities companies it will reduce competitiveness of American companies in the world. I would like to remind Steve that American companies already have more regulations. They are still not the most heavily regulated. Every industry is always opposed to any change that will add to their cost. But in fact all costs are always passed on to their customers. For e.g. environmental regulations in California are most stringent than in Texas but California still have very profitable refineries operating there. They did not shut down due to regulation.
I do feel that a proper investigation needs to be completed with regards to BPA and until then it is in the public interest to ban this chemical wherever necessary. If you look back in history there were people who did not regard cigarettes as a harmful product and denied it as a cause of cancer for years.
Its better to err on the side of caution rather than take chances with lives of people especially vulnerable children whom this product can be extra harmful to.
I keep hearing that there is ONLY a minimal amount of BPA in products....how does that make it any better? If it is a cancer causing substance, then even a little is too much! It's like saying:" I only smoke a little, so it's ok"
There are substitutes out there - use them!
I would like to know whether there was a study done to analyze the cumulative effect of exposure to bpa products. Your guest mentions that; for example, the receipt exposure is minimal. I would like to know what is the amount of exposure if we add all the products we consume that are contaminated with bpa.
Steven Hentges claims that science has already concluded that BPA is safe, which is completely untrue. He confuses listeners (deliberately, it seems) by saying that the levels of BPA are incredibly tiny. But that's only half of the story, because science has also discovered that the EFFECTIVE DOSE of BPA is also incredibly tiny.
For example, Professor Vom Saal (U. of Missouri) published alarming findings in PNAS over 10 years ago:
http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/pages/frontline/shows/nature/interviews/vomsaal....
"We experimentally elevated estradiol by one tenth of one TRILLIONTH of a gram of estradiol in a milliliter of blood. We estimate that we're increasing estradiol by about one molecule of estradiol per cell in the body. Okay? The consequence of this is that at the end of the first day of development of the prostate in the male fetuses we could see dramatic change in the sprouting of prostate glands. We rendered the prostate abnormally enlarged, and this was detectable within twenty-four hours of the beginning of its embryonic development. And when we looked at these treated animals as adults, that difference had persisted. They had abnormally enlarged prostates that were hyper-responsive to hormones."
My apologies. In my haste, I included a quote that is actually about estradiol, but the professor explains the link between estradiol and BPA. He also said this about the levels of BPA:
"Now the important point about detection by instrumentation of the bisphenol-A is that, based on our research, the ability of the current instruments used to monitor for bisphenol-A in food is a much lower level of detection than what our animals are able to detect. It's a huge difference as a matter of fact. So that you can put food that you have in contact with plastic into a chemical analysis and say there is no plastic material there."
What ever happened to glass? Was the push to plastic containers a response to REAL safety concerns or simply the influence of the plastics/petroleum industry. Seems to me that the risk from glass is at least one that you can easily protect yourself and your children from - unlike all the hidden risks that have come to life with the increased use of plastics.
In the greater world, comsumers are king, but retail workers deserve consideration when it comes to BPA exposure. I work in retail. I am sure I have touched a thousand reciepts in a busy day. Our cells really ARE just as important as everyone elses!
We have friends who bring us "beans in a box" from Italy. Why is it that we can't buy foods in a box here in the US?
Janet in Dallas
If you ever do a show on BPA again, I strongly recommend that you have as one of your guests, Dr. Tom Brady, of Pllastics Technology, Inc. in Holland, Ohio. PTI was founded by Dr. Brady, a chemical engineer with degrees from Dartmouth and the University of Michicgan, and the company essentially serves as the R&D arm of the plastic container industry. If there is something about plastics or a component of plastics, Dr. Brady would know the answers and what the industry is doing about BPA or anything else related to a plastics question. Dr. Brady essentially invented the plastic soft drink container, used first by Coca Cola and now used by every consumer products company all over the world. Whenever one of these companies needs to redesign a container, they go to PTI to get the job done. So, that is what I suggest you do. Dr. Brady knows more than the rest of these people combined about plastics, their behavior and their components and I believe he would be a good guest for your show.
I worked for Appleton Papers for many years and I am now on disability from exposure to the chemicals used in carbonless copy paper and thermal paper. After researching, they had 26 patents using Bisphenol A in the manufacturing of their products. They claim they no longer use this chemical but still recycle it so it still goes back into the manufacturing process. Many of my former co-workers are now deceased and too many of us are suffering from diabetes along with numerous other medical problems.
This is a classic example of a manufactured controversy. Fred Vom Saal and other university-based researchers claim to be objective because they don't profit from the sale of BPA. In fact, because of the way the university grant system works, they must present BPA as a dangerous threat to health if they are to obtain research funds. A university research program is no different from GM or the Boy Scouts, their primary purpose is to perpetuate themselves. I wasn't able to call in during the program, but I would have liked to ask one of the experts to compare the estrogen equivalents in a baby bottle filled with soy-based formula--how much from leached BPA vs the soy? I'm sure it's not even close. And neither one is in amounts high enough to matter. By far the most important endocrine disruptor in the over-developed world is calories. The resultant obesity accelerates puberty and increases cancer risk.
As I understand things, the push to plastic came initially from the soft drink industry, which was largely selling its product in aluminum cans. The cans are, compared to plastic a more expensive and more fragile product. Again, as I understand things, Coca Cola wanted an alternative to aluminum cans and paid for the initial development of the plastic bottle. This occurred after the industry had already abandoned glass bottles because of two primary factors, glass is heavy, and thus more expensive to ship and it also breaks. The latter is also a problem with aluminum cans, if you have ever dropped one and had it dent and spring a leak from somewhere on the can. Plastic bottles have largely solved all of those problems. It is light, largely unbreakable, less expensive to produce. and because of its high quality, it is recyclable.
Fred von Saal tested the BPA in carbonless too. It had 100 x the exposure of food packaging.
I don't know that any research has been done about what happens to BPA when it gets into soil or water that is used for growing food. If I were you, before jumping to any conclusions about what happens to the BPA in receipts that gets into your compost, I would continue to garden as usual and then send representative samples of your produce for testing, specifically for BPA, and perhaps for other things that you might consider risky. I would send several types of vegetables, inclduing a root vegetable (carrot or beet, for example), lettuce or other leafy crop, and something like tomatoes. I would assume that for such testing these crops should not be exposed to any other kind of fertilizer or pestiide. That will give you a definitive answer to your question.
At first we were told that ingesting BPA will lead to all these kinds of crazy illnesses (as if we ingest tons of it on a daily basis), now we are told that touching the receipts can be deadly. This is ridiculous! I don't see why anyone should be scared, unless they plan to chew on these receipts, or wrap their bodies in them. Read JunkScienceMom's blog post which disqualifies this whole receipts argument: http://bit.ly/ckvwu9
That's a straw man from sciencematters.
The question is not "ingesting tons of it"; the problem is that BPA causes harm in miniscule concentrations (as I cited above).
Writing about university researchers, subgeeze claims that "their primary purpose is to perpetuate themselves."
That classic example of anti-science rhetoric is also a primary basis of climate change denial (as repeated ad nauseam on the internet) – to the great harm of us all.
Anyone who actually does scientific research knows that grant funding sometimes affects the particular choice of research projects, but it rarely (if ever) affects the outcome of that research – as subgeeze falsely implies.
BTW, the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel’s coverage of BPA was so slanted and one-sided the newspaper was ridiculed by On Milwaukee for its sloppy coverage http://bit.ly/9FkKgo
To NClarkson's concern about recycling receipts, EWG had this to say on their website "Do not recycle receipts and other thermal paper. BPA residues from receipts will contaminate recycled paper." It seems to me that this would suggest the composted receipts could also be a potential contaminant for your garden produce.
Please google search "GMA Dr. Oz Dr. Roizen pregnancy" and watch the video. Carbonless receipts can have 100 times more BPA than the plastics removed from the market. The info posted on the screen states that you should ask for an "e-receipt".
Then take the time to read the "Recommendations" in the NIOSH Hazard Review at: http://www.cdc.gov/niosh/docs/2001-107/ . You will know to NOT touch your eyes, mouth, face. You will know to wash your hands. You will know that this product should be stored in a cool dry place. You will have to try to determine how to limit your contact with the stuff. (e-receipt starting to sound like a good idea?) Please be sure to click on the full report or call CDC and get a free copy for yourself at 1-800-CDC-INFO.
A real eye opener can be found at:
www.businessweek.com/2000/00_50/b3711180.htm. This chronological history of events will leave you wondering why Appleton Papers is "NOT BOTHERING " to use BPA in their paper anymore which was announced by Meg Kissinger. What about thermal papers? These papers and receipts also have BPA in them, and Appleton is one of the largest manufacturers of this product. Does Meg know? Does anyone know? What about the other manufacturers of carbonless receipts and thermal papers? Are they also "NOT BOTHERING"?
The JAMA article (JAMA, 1988; 260(2): 242-243 substantiates life threatening reactions to some of the chemicals in carbonless copy papers. There are currently 90 citations in the PubMed data base.
Does anyone "Google" these topics anymore, or are discussions simply based on what the participants have in their data base of knowledge, regardless of however limited it might be?
Please google search "GMA Dr. Oz Dr. Roizen pregnancy" and watch the video. Carbonless receipts can have 100 times more BPA than the plastics removed from the market. The info posted on the screen states that you should ask for an "e-receipt".
Then take the time to read the "Recommendations" in the NIOSH Hazard Review at: http://www.cdc.gov/niosh/docs/2001-107/ . You will know to NOT touch your eyes, mouth, face. You will know to wash your hands. You will know that this product should be stored in a cool dry place. You will have to try to determine how to limit your contact with the stuff. (e-receipt starting to sound like a good idea?) Please be sure to click on the full report or call CDC and get a free copy for yourself at 1-800-CDC-INFO.
A real eye opener can be found at:
www.businessweek.com/2000/00_50/b3711180.htm. This chronological history of events will leave you wondering why Appleton Papers is "NOT BOTHERING " to use BPA in their paper anymore which was announced by Meg Kissinger. What about thermal papers? These papers and receipts also have BPA in them, and Appleton is one of the largest manufacturers of this product. Does Meg know? Does anyone know? What about the other manufacturers of carbonless receipts and thermal papers? Are they also "NOT BOTHERING"?
The JAMA article (JAMA, 1988; 260(2): 242-243 substantiates life threatening reactions to some of the chemicals in carbonless copy papers. There are currently 90 citations in the PubMed data base.
Does anyone "Google" these topics anymore, or are discussions simply based on what the participants have in their data base of knowledge, regardless of however limited it might be?
Some think BP executives should go to prison. I think Appleton and many other manufacturers of thermal and carbonless copy paper should spend time behind bars for decades of obsfucation and out right lies, not to mentio the chronic and terminal illnesses they have caused. And yes, they put us on junkscience.com and quackwatch.com. There is a paper trail. There may be no legal record due to secret settlements, but there is a paper trail. I wish Ken Cook had known more on the issue. A missed opportunity, but there are more NPR stations and other media outlets. Maybe some will look into paper recycling and ask why the EPA has allowed these products into the mixed paper stream. Is it any wonder why our recycled paper is contaminated?
So "Sciencematters", can you tell me what "Science" you are associated with? I think real science may have left you in the dust. It also appears that your referenced "JunkScienceMom" may be too busy looking after children, and has a lot of current reading to catch up on.
The European Union (EU), World Health Organization (WHO), Food and Drug Administration (FDA), European Food Safety Authority (EFSA) and other authorities have conducted many studies and find no issues with BPA exposure on store receipts. More about thermal paper and bpa.