Anyway

Bisphenol‑A, a chem­ic­al found in many of those hard plastic water bottles (look for polycar­bon­ates with the recyc­ling num­ber 7, although not all of those have BPA in them) has been in the news recently, cul­min­at­ing in today’s announce­ment of a ban of baby bottles con­tain­ing BPA by Health Canada. This con­tin­ues a trend from a US Nation­al Tox­ic­o­logy Pro­gram report that expressed con­cern, although it stopped short of call­ing BPA dan­ger­ous. Since, like many house­holds, we have quite a few of these bottles around, and since the chem­ic­al is sup­posed to be par­tic­u­larly dan­ger­ous to infants, I figured I should see which of the many plastic bottles and baby bottles we have might be safe. The polycar­bon­ate bottles are deservedly pop­u­lar; they don’t have the “plastic” taste that bottles made of #5 plastics do (although those are said to be com­pletely safe since they don’t leach), and they are unbreak­able, unlike glass.

Look­ing at vari­ous man­u­fac­turer­’s web sites shows you who’s pre­pared and who’s stick­ing their heads in the sand hop­ing it will all blow over. In the pre­pared cat­egory, Rub­ber­maid gets full marks for hav­ing a clear page list­ing all the products with and without BPA. Nal­gene (made fam­ous in Van­couver when MEC, a major loc­al store took all the bottles off its shelves because of BPA) states they’re phas­ing out BPA and prom­ises to have new non-BPA products using trit­an instead of polycar­bon­ate in the stores start­ing next month. I don’t have any of their bottles, but I know a lot of people do. Camel­bak points out on their web site’s front page that not all #7 plastics con­tain BPA (true), but ignores the fact that there’s no way a con­sumer can tell which ones do. They’re also intro­du­cing a line that uses non-BPA trit­an. I gave a friend one of the Camel­bak bottles for Christ­mas and will replace it once the trit­an ver­sions come out.

In the middle, since they don’t use BPA, but don’t tell people that on the web site are Medela, who make vari­ous breast­feed­ing pumps and accessor­ies, includ­ing bottles. The Brita water fil­ter com­pany has a hor­rible flash web site with no search but­ton any­where. The pitch­er does­n’t look to me like it’s made out of polycar­bon­ate and that was con­firmed from this post. It would make sense for Brita to add that inform­a­tion to their FAQ.

On the unpre­pared side, Ger­ber loses points for not even men­tion­ing the issue any­where on their site; the baby bottles I have from them are num­ber 7 and oth­er sources say they have BPA, so out they go. Tom­mee Tip­pee (a U.K. brand for baby bottles ad sipyy cups) has a page from Janu­ary 2007 in which they say BPA is per­fectly safe and that they use it in some products, without men­tion­ing which, so I’m not sure what to do about the ages-old hard plastic sippy cup I have from them. It isn’t polycar­bon­ate, but does it have BPA in it? No idea. Avent is anoth­er baby bottle man­u­fac­turer that admits they use BPA and say it’s safe. Tom­mee Tip­pee isn’t avail­able in Canada any­way, but I guess the oth­er two are going to have some prob­lems in the next little while, as are the retail­ers that stock them.

There are lots of blogs out there with list­ings of products that have or do not have BPA (e.g., this one). As with many health issues it’s hard to know how to far to go without going over­board, par­tic­u­larly with vari­ous health admin­is­tra­tions seem­ingly dif­fer­ing in their views of what the risk really is. I find it iron­ic, how­ever, that the man­u­fac­tur­ers of products mostly used by adults, where the risk is smal­ler, seem to be more respons­ive than those of products used by the infants who are most susceptible.