Skip to content
Join our Newsletter

Food and drink

Goodbye to plastic baby bottles — and more

Safely navigating around bad plastic and bisphenol A

 

Ding dong, tolls the bell. Bring out your dead.

Your dead plastic water bottles, that is. And your dead plastic baby bottles. And all those plastic-lined tinned goods you were stockpiling, thinking you had a good supply of food on hand for one of the many pending doomsdays.

And as you rid yourself of all those bottles and containers made from hard, clear plastic, which often comes in deceptively gay colours, be glad, once again, that you live in Canada. We are the first country in the world to give a highly toxic rating to bisphenol A (BPA), which is used in numerous substances, including polycarbonate (or PC) plastic, epoxy resins and even dental amalgam. And we are the first country in the world to ban baby bottles made with polycarbonate plastic.

Not to say you first read about the downside of plastic water bottles and the like here, but you did read about it, in 2005 and again in 2006. Now with the federal designation made last Friday, hopefully you won’t have to read about it here again!

So what does it all mean? I asked Sean Griffin, research coordinator for Toxic Free Canada (formerly the Labour Environmental Alliance Society) and author of CancerSmart 3.0: The Consumer Guide , to help deconstruct Friday’s news.

To start, the “arcane process” of banning BPA goes like this. Under the Canadian Environmental Protection Act (CEPA), enacted in 1999, is a provision for declaring certain substances toxic, according to the act’s criteria, due to environmental considerations, health considerations or both.

Once a substance is designated and listed as CEPA-toxic, the federal government has several options: doing nothing; setting up a risk management plan on how to use that substance; or, in rare cases, working toward eliminating it.

“For BPA, they’ve planned to list it under Schedule 1 (of CEPA), which is a very high listing for very, very toxic substances,” says Sean. What follows is a 60-day comment period.

“The historic precedent in this case is that for both environmental and health reasons, they’re also going to take the unusual step to introduce legislation to ban polycarbonate baby bottles, that is baby bottles made from plastic that potentially leaches BPA, after the 60-day period.”

The news had call-in phone lines burning up last week. Mountain Equipment Co-op started an earlier flurry when it pulled all polycarbonate water bottles off its shelves. But now babies and toddlers were on the line and anxious moms were worried, with good reason.

While you’d be hard-pressed to find a PC plastic baby bottle on store shelves today, people might still be using them at home. As well, BPA can be in other plastic items that babies or toddlers use.

It’s particularly problematic for babies — and adults — if the plastic container is heated, say with hot water or by microwaving it. A University of Cincinnati study found that BPA migration rates are 55 times greater when boiling water is poured in them. And no, you can’t “wash out” the BPA by heating the bottles over and over or putting them in a dishwasher — the BPA continually leaches out until the bottle disintegrates.

So what’s the danger? Essentially BPA is an endocrine disrupter, which means it can alter genetic coding of cells. Knowledge of it as an estrogen-mimicker goes back to the 1930s.

“In the human body, there are receptors on all cells, and those receptors react in certain ways to the hormones they’re receiving and express different genetic signals, telling the body to either secrete another hormone, or to grow and develop, or to secrete a protein that might result in another cell process. Millions of different processes in the human body are triggered by these little cell receptors,” says Sean. “And what they (scientists) have found about BPA is that it reacts very much like the human hormone estrogen, but it also reacts with estrogen in ways that estrogen alone does not effect.”

BPA has the potential to trigger very aggressive forms of breast cancer; it can decrease male fertility or cause testicles not to descend; it can make people with type 1 diabetes resistant to insulin.

The other “danger” is how ubiquitous BPA is, since it comes in so many forms, including the polycarbonate lining inside tin cans. It’s also hard to tell what is PC plastic and what isn’t. And no, the recycled number 7 isn’t a surefire indicator. A “7” may or may not be polycarbonate. However, a “PC” stamp on the plastic indicates it certainly is, but not all polycarbonates are stamped with “PC”, or the “7” in the little triangle, for that matter.

“If it’s clear, hard or coloured plastic, chances are it’s polycarbonate,” says Sean.

It’s ironic that most of those little bottles of “healthy” water people buy (then discard) and even the giant 18.5-litre water cooler bottles as well as the containers for Brita water-filter jugs are all made from polycarbonate plastic containing BPA.

As for milky-white, soft plastic Nalgene bottles or orange juice jugs, they are made of high- or low-density polyethylene, which is okay. Happy Planet has also moved to a polyethylene bottle, so there’s a conscientious supplier of drinks. But watch out for Tupperware — they still declare polycarbonate as “safe” and some of their products, including their Rock ’n’ Serve container for microwave use, are made from PC plastic. However, their baby products are PC plastic-free.

Your best bet is to go to non-plastic materials altogether — glass for baby bottles, of course, and whatever else you can. For safe, non-glass water bottles, Sean suggests Laken, SIGG and Kleen Kanteen products, though I take strong exception to the caps on the latter — they leak! (All the plastic caps on these are safe.)

The other risk factor is that while BPA isn’t that persistent (it clears quickly from our bodies and the environment), we are regularly exposed to so much of it from so many sources, including our water tables as BPA leaches out of landfills and into sewage systems. And what recent headlines aren’t telling you is that it’s also an environmental concern — aquatic life is very sensitive to BPA.

In the end, we can’t use it, we can’t recycle it, and we can’t throw it out. What do we do with it? “That is a problem,” admits Sean, who tried to find me an answer.

So while the feds have taken an excellent first step, it’s just the beginning. Consumers have spoken and Health Canada has heard us. Now we need to keep up the pressure and get polycarbonate plastic out of water bottles, tin cans, and products used by pregnant women, or at least warn them through labelling — and we need to find safe ways to dispose of the stuff.

 

Glenda Bartosh is an award-winning freelance writer who highly recommends CancerSmart 3.0: The Consumer Guide available at http://leas.ca.