UPDATED 3/30/12: From our friends at Natural Resources Defense Council: “The Food and Drug Administration said today it would allow bisphenol A (BPA) to remain in food packaging, an action that keeps the hormone-disrupting chemical linked to cancer, obesity and a host of other health problems in the food supply.
In rejecting a petition today from the Natural Resources Defense Council, the agency emphasized it was not making a final determination of BPA’s safety and instead will continue to examine the ongoing research of BPA’s effects on health.”
THANK YOU to all those who added your voices to this important debate. The fight to get this toxic chemical out of our food supply continues.
It took four long years, but the U.S. Food and Drug Administration is close to making a decision on the safety of the chemical bisphenol A (BPA) in our food supply.
By March 31, the FDA must finally respond to a petition filed in 2008 by the Natural Resources Defense Council (NRDC) asking the agency to ban the use of the toxic chemical BPA as a food additive. BPA is used as an epoxy resin to line food and beverage containers and extend the shelf life of these products; unfortunately that gives BPA a marvelous opportunity (as documented by a groundbreaking 2007 study by the Environmental Working Group) to leach into these products, get consumed by humans, and wreak havoc on said humans’ health.
NRDC’s petition is based on overwhelming scientific evidence of BPA’s numerous and varied detrimental health impacts, including cancer, abnormal brain development, and reproductive harm. And the evidence of BPA’s threat to human health has only grown stronger over the years that the FDA refused to respond to the request. The FDA itself shifted its position back in 2010 and stopped claiming that trace BPA contamination in food and beverages is safe, but continued its radio silence on the NRDC petition.
After years of the FDA’s stonewalling, NRDC sued the agency and the court set a mandatory deadline of March 31st for the FDA to respond. In the meantime, the FDA kicked off a public comment period on February 17th on the American Chemistry Council’s (ACC’s) request to ban BPA from baby bottles and sippy cups (a far more narrow ban than requested by NRDC).
The industry’s request is at first glance surprising news for those of us who watched the ACC pour millions of dollars into an effort to stop a similar ban on BPA in children’s feeding products from becoming law in California. After several years of attempting to block this common-sense protection for our state’s children, they were finally defeated by the good work and perseverance of California Assemblywoman Betsy Butler, who authored and fought for the ban, and numerous environmental, public health and consumer advocates (including thousands of CLCV members) who joined together in pressuring on-the-fence lawmakers to vote the right way.
According to NRDC’s Sarah Janssen:
The ACC even had a secret meeting where BPA producers and users concluded the best way to improve BPA’s image was to find a pregnant young mother who could be their spokesperson!
Wow. What a fabulously manipulative and outright disgusting strategy! (Although I’m pretty sure I never saw that ill-conceived campaign, perhaps because no pregnant woman in her right mind would go along with it.) So why is the chemical industry suddenly trying to play the role of the good guy on this?
Maybe because, as they’ve acknowledged publicly, they’ve already lost the battle on these kinds of products–most of which have already phased out BPA after the chemical was banned in children’s feeding products by 11 U.S. states, the European Union, Canada and even China. By putting forward this narrower ban, perhaps they can distract from the fight for a more comprehensive ban on BPA in other widely used products like canned foods?
(By the way, the chemical industry only had to wait four months for the FDA to seek public comments on their request, in contrast to NRDC’s four-year wait. The FDA appears prepared to grant the ACC’s request at the end of the comment period.)
I was pregnant during the California bill’s nail-biter of a journey through committee hearings and floor votes. I walked (waddled, really) the halls of the Capitol Building in Sacramento back in May 2011 talking to several lawmakers about why they should do the right thing and pass Butler’s AB 1319 to ban BPA from baby bottles and sippy cups. My son was just a few months old when the bill finally made it to the governor’s desk, where Jerry Brown did the right thing by signing it into law. I was ecstatic. This was, and continues to be, an enormous step forward for children’s health; a real, honest-to-goodness victory of the grassroots over a powerful industry.
But it can’t be enough. Because one morning a few months ago, while I was feeding my baby some of his first solid foods–organic, non-genetically modified food–from a glass jar of Earth’s Best, I had the sudden and sickening realization that the lid to the jar, which I had just scraped to get the last spoonful of pureed peas, was almost certainly coated with BPA. After a two-minute Internet search, I confirmed that it was. BPA is so ubiquitous, it’s in the lid of organic, non-GMO baby food. And lots and lots of other places it shouldn’t be.
It’s time for FDA to do the right thing. BPA must be banned from our food supply, period. As NRDC’s Sarah Janssen said so succinctly:
[FDA’s] job is to protect the public’s health, not corporate interests. FDA should not wait for a green light from industry before deciding to regulate a chemical. Instead, it should be more responsive to public demands, transparent in its process, and let science, not corporate interests, lead its decisions.
We have only a few more days until the FDA’s March 31 deadline. Contact the FDA and let them know you expect them to ensure our food is safe by revoking the approval of BPA as a food additive.
