The packaging industry is quite familiar with the chemical known as BPA. My fellow columnist, Calvin Frost, has dutifully brought issues surrounding this ubiquitous and questionable compound to our attention in his Letters from the Earth. The consuming public is increasingly aware of bisphenol-A as well, the result of reporting by the general media. Efforts are under way among various manufacturers to replace BPA because its potential effects on human health are many and major. It turns out, though, that the replacements aren’t exactly question-free.

BPA is used in plastic bottles and containers to strengthen the plastic. It is a component in the plastic epoxy lining of food and beverage cans – for soda, beer, tomatoes, tuna, soup, beans and just about every other food – for the purpose of preventing the contents from reacting with the metal. It’s also part of many other items with which we come into contact, such as dental fillings, medical and dental devices, eyeglass lenses, CDs and DVDs, household electronics, sports equipment and cash register receipts.
The chemical has been associated with a range of human ailments, including cancer, diabetes, irregular brain development in children, and reproductive issues. In 2012, the US Food and Drug Administration (FDA) banned its use in baby bottles and sippy cups, and later added infant formula containers to the list.

According to medicalnewstoday.com, bisphenol-A “can behave in a similar way to estrogen and other hormones in the human body.” The report says that BPA “is an endocrine disruptor – a substance which interferes with the production, secretion, transport, action, function and elimination of natural hormones. BPA can imitate our body’s own hormones in a way that could be hazardous for health. Babies and young children are said to be especially sensitive to the effects of BPA.”

The article goes on to list the possible health effects, just about everything nobody wants to have: heart disease, effects on memory and learning, breast cancer, asthma, male impotence and a host of other reproductive undesirables.

In February of 2014, a group of FDA scientists published a study finding that low-level exposure to BPA is safe. This was met with nods of satisfaction by the chemical industry, FDA officials and the media. According to Mother Jones, others at the FDA learned that the lab where the research took place was contaminated, affecting the test results. Work continues in the science community to determine the effects of BPA as thoroughly as possible, though it’s likely that political and economic interests also will have their say in the outcome.

The European Food Safety Authority recently ended its own BPA reassessment with the same conclusion found by the FDA, although the French government has a different opinion and instituted a ban on the compound. In 2010, Health Canada found BPA in eight canned beers that it tested, but called the levels “extremely low” and reiterated its assessment that “current dietary exposure to BPA through food packaging uses is not expected to pose a health risk to the general population.”

(In the US beer business, cans accounted for 53.2% of the market in 2012, all of them lined with BPA. The use of cans in the craft beer business has been growing at a steady pace.)

The other side of the argument is populated by quite a few scientists and medical people who point to research reports from around the world showing that consuming canned beer, soup, soy milk and other products resulted in high spikes of BPA in the urine of test subjects.

Safe or not, now wears the garb of a bad guy in the minds of many a consumer and manufacturer, and efforts to remove it from the packaging industry are growing. One can now see labels on store shelves proclaiming that a product is “BPA-Free.” An organization called BPA-Free Package now exists (bpafreepackage.org) to promote the use of containers and other products without the chemical in question and to brand the products with the “BPA-Free” label.

Regrettable substitutions
What do people think when they see a label that says “BPA-Free”?  The answer might surprise you.

“Products with the label ‘BPA-Free’ have become ubiquitous on store shelves in recent years. It’s a trend that has been driven by consumer concerns that the chemical bisphenol-A, or BPA, may be harmful at low doses. Yet a recent study suggests that the label may mislead consumers into thinking that ‘free’ means ‘safer’ – even when there’s a chance that the substances used to substitute for BPA may also be harmful. The study is one of the first to explore how consumer responses to uncertainty and ambiguity in risk information may lead to ‘regrettable substitutions’ – the replacement of one material with another that is potentially less safe.”

Those are the words of Andrew Maynard, professor of environmental health sciences at the University of Michigan and director of the UM Risk Science Center. Maynard, along with Laura Scherer and other colleagues at Michigan, examined consumer judgments of BPA and its alternatives in a paper addressing the psychology of regrettable substitutions, published in November 2014 in the journal Health, Risk and Society. In a closely linked pair of studies, consumers had to choose “between a reasonably well-characterized risk, which some experts are still debating (BPA), and a totally unknown risk (PET).”

The researchers found that “substance-free” labels can mislead consumers.

“These two studies suggest that participants did not have a strong or a stable preference for well-studied chemicals with possible but low likelihood health risks (BPA) versus a chemical that is virtually unknown with regard to its health risks (PET). They also indicate that controversial evidence of harm – or at least widely reported controversy – may be viewed as being no better or worse than having no information at all.

“When it comes to labeling, the studies indicate that a product labeled as ‘BPA-free’ leads to greater acceptance of that product, even when consumers know that BPA has been substituted with another substance that may potentially be more harmful. In other words, the findings indicate that labels like this are misleading, and are likely to cause some people to accept substitute chemicals that they might otherwise reject.”

In other words, consumers might be more comfortable with the evil they don’t know than the evil they do know. (Rather unlike the way people vote in elections, isn’t it?)

The UM scientists used PET as the alternative to BPA in their research, but in the real world two of the chemicals being employed to supplant BPA are BPS and BPF, aka bisphenol-S and bisphenol-F. These two are relatives of -A. They are both endocrine disruptors. Little is known about them, but BPS was recently found to cause irregular heartbeats in female lab rats, the result of cellular response to estrogen, according to a study published in Environmental Health Perspectives.

According to a recent report in Time, the BPA-Free Package program “is halting operations because the certification creates a ‘false halo of health’ given growing evidence of the dangers of BPS and BPF.”

It seems obvious – and I’m no scientist, mind you – that if it’s not a good idea to have the fox guarding the hen house, then don’t replace him with the coyote or the jackal.

As soon as I finish writing this, I’m going to open a can of beer and raise it in honor of my Uncle Steve, who has been drinking Schaefer beer from cans since beer was first canned in the 1930s. He buys a 30-pack once a week, and he’s 94 years old. Go figure. 

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The author is president of Jack Kenny Media, a communications firm specializing in the packaging industry, and is the former editor of L&NW magazine. He can be reached at jackjkenny@gmail.com.