More BPA resources

Two BPA-themed e-newsletters just landed in my in-box. The Center for a New American Dream’s dispatch mentions a helpful site, the Bisphenol A Portal, which compiles news reports about the endocrine-disrupting chemical. Particularly helpful is the site’s Smart Plastics Guide (pdf), which breaks down what all those numbers on plastic containers mean and gives tips on how to avoid BPA.

The most recent e-newsletter from the Environmental Working Group’s points to the BPA cheatsheet on its Enviroblog. Interestingly, the central graphic used on that page is a water bottle made by Nalgene, which recently announced that it will phase out production of BPA-containing bottles.

Comments

[Jeremiah]

Great roundup, just a couple of notes:

EWG's cheat sheet does not acknowledge Tritan copolyester, a new #7 which is claimed by the manufacturer to be BPA- and phthalate-free. It looks just like polycarbonate, rendering the "avoid #7" claim even less useful than it previously was.

The Smart Plastics Guide is very, very, very outdated. I'm not trying to plug our report, but that guide is one of the reasons we started reporting on the topic in the first place.

[Bronwyn]

Hi Jeremiah,

Thanks for pointing that out -- how embarrassing.

I'm curious if you trust Tritan copolyester, and whether there's any way to tell if any given #7 container is Tritan as opposed to polycarbonate. I'm guessing not -- don't #7s all just say "other"? Perhaps *that's* the problem.

Assuming you can't tell the difference, since many #7s are polycarbonate, do you think it's best on the whole for people to avoid #7? (& I wonder if that's why Tritan is not mentioned on Enviroblog's cheatsheet...)

Your site is great. Thanks for all the work you put into it.

[Jennifer]

Check the link in my sig for some updated consumer reporting we just published today on ZRecs about how Amazon.com is handling the BPA issue. Reporting like this can run into issues staying online so we'd appreciate any link, alert, or synopsis/commentary you wanted to provide for your readers.

Tritan is a bit of an unknown and they did not jump out with testing data for consumers, which you might otherwise expect.

Other companies and even plastics manufacturers are surely giving it the once-over at this point, and it it proves safe under evolving standards it won't be a brand name for much longer, just as Lexan is now polycarbonate - it can be reverse engineered and materials like this are not patentable, so the manufacturer's goal in this case is to try to attach as much value to the brand name version as they can before all the clones come out and start competing on price.

A lot of consumers have the same problem interpreting the #7 code because of layered plastics (like Gerber plastic food containers) which are also not PC but are not recyclable. We think the best approach is to remember it's just an "other" category, i.e. NOT #1,2,3,4,5 or 6. Especially since as people work on new plastics that are also not going to be supported by recycling programs based on their relative rarity, they get classified as #7 too - any cool new bioplastics will be stuck with the number, so we hate to see it smeared as a "type to avoid."

The two manufacturers we know of who are using Tritan at this point, Camelbak and Nalgene, are labeling their bottles - not just the packaging, but the bottles themselves - with little "BPA-free" logos. Nalgene appears to be following Camelbak's lead in this regard, and it's a key move for them to shift their brand away from the direct association (in Nalgene's case, their fault as much as anyone else's) with polycarbonate.

Again, thanks for sharing our info with your readers. We love your blog and are glad we found it. Keep it up.

[Amanda]

Thanks for the link, Bronwyn

In our experience, consumers want a super-easy way to avoid BPA -- and telling them to avoid rigid, transparent #7 plastics is the best way to get the point across. Perhaps we should add "unless they're expressly marked BPA-free" as a qualifier. If the gov't would get off their behinds and do something about BPA, we wouldn't need to talk about it at all!

PS -- EWG is working on an analysis of Tritan copolyester, so hopefully we'll have something to report soon.