Chicago says: Bisphenol, Eh?

If you drank from a plastic water bottle, ate lunch from a take-out container, or nuked yesterday's leftover lasagna in a plastic bowl, you may have ingested some bisphenol-A. Bisphenol-A, or BPA, is a chemical compound commonly used to line food containers and harden the plastic used to make baby bottles, sippy cups and other consumer goods. But yesterday Chicago became the first city in the U.S. to ban the sale of baby feeding products containing the chemical.

I wrote an article about bisphenol-A leaching into San Diego's oceans a couple of years ago, and part of that story hinged on environmentalists' and surfers' concerns over the hormone-like effects of chemicals in plastics:

... the plastics used to make bags, clear bottles and food packaging contain controversial hormones like Bisphenol A, a chemical that mimics the sex hormone estrogen, and whose health effects are disputed by scientists and the plastics industry. Some animal studies have shown Bisphenol A to cause certain types of cancer, affect brain functions and cause miscarriages and infertility, but FDA regulators have found it to be harmless at the levels found in plastic packaging. Nonetheless, Moore charged that Bisphenol A and similar chemicals leach from plastic debris into the ocean and put surfers' health at risk.

The controversial nature of these chemicals drove me to purchase my much-loved aluminum Sigg bottle (now on its third incarnation thanks to my carelessness), which now replaces the four to six plastic water bottles I went through each week of high school. I commend the City Council for their decision, which signals the usefulness of more critical inquiry into the health effects of consumer goods.

Of course, the American Chemistry Council has already released a statement deriding the new law as "contrary to the global consensus on the safety of BPA" and charging that the Council ignores the expert evaluations that have deemed the compound safe. This argument too thoroughly to privilege studies of chemicals and consumer products conducted for the purpose of legitimizing products of dubious safety, so it really heartens me to see a governing body put the question of public awareness and consumer safety over the product.