From Scientific American comes this feel-bad story. Remember how your plastic water bottle had a “BPA-free” sticker on it? That’s good. BPA is harmful and is thought to cause cancer. Surprise twist ending, the thing they replaced it with is just as bad!
“[Manufacturers] put ‘BPA-free’ on the label, which is true. The thing they neglected to tell you is that what they’ve substituted for BPA has not been tested for the same kinds of problems that BPA has been shown to cause. That’s a little bit sneaky.”
How could this happen?
Currently, no federal agency tests the toxicity of new materials before they are allowed on the market. “We’re paying a premium for a ‘safer’ product that isn’t even safer,” [University of Calgary scientist Deborah] Kurrasch says. There are many types of bisphenols out there, so part of the public’s responsibility “is making sure [manufacturers] don’t just go from BPA to BPS to BPF or whatever the next one is.”