We've been seeing a lot of talk about BPA in toilet paper across social media channels recently, which we first reported on back in November 2008. We thought we'd bring up a few of our posts from the archive in case you missed them.

• Some Unpleasant Sources of BPA: As it turns out, the source of BPA in toilet paper appears not to be that it is added deliberately to the product, but that a lot of toilet paper is made from post-consumer sources that include lots of recycled thermal printing paper (credit card receipts).


• Can't find time to exercise? Twelve simple ways to activate your life: It's February and if you're like me then your struggling to hang onto that last goal or resolution you made back in January. Here's an article from the archives with a few suggestions to fit exercise into daily life. Do you have other ideas you can add?


• Get Kids Moving with the Yoga Garden Game: If you're looking for a way to entertain some cagey kids during winter, check out our review of the Yoga Garden Game. Board game plus movement? Score!

Welcome to Ask ZRecs! Today, we have answers to burning reader questions about safer nail polish for kids, cloth diapers that won't stay up, tagless rashes, curiously modest BPA-free claims, Munchkin straw cup cleaning, and bunnies on electric trains.

Safer nail polish for kids

Dear ZRecs,

I wonder if you have criteria for Z’s nail polish. There are so many chemicals in nail polish and L is still prone to keeping his fingers in his mouth. He would love to paint his nails, but I resisted because of the unknowns in the nail polish. Thoughts?

Carrie S

Carrie, Z has a variety of caregivers and compatriots who pay varying levels of attention and/or lip service to our product safety requests. I'm guessing that nail polish came from being treated at a nail place (nobody I know could do those polka dots) and that it was not a brand we'd consider to be "safer." As for a recommendation, we'd suggest Piggy Paint.

Droopy drawers

Dear ZRecs,

Can you give me any advice for keeping the diaper up on my extremely active 2 year old? It is really the first bump I've run into with cloth diapers that I can't seem to find an answer too. I'm using thirsty covers (I have v1 and v2) with prefolds. I do have some fitted diapers, but find they are more likely to wick on to her clothes if the diaper gets very full. I would argue that the velcro might be wearing out but it doesn't seem to matter. New and old fall down. Help!

Dana

To answer your question, Dana, we turned to Kim Rosas, who knows the ins and outs of cloth diapering and shares her expertise with readers of Dirty Diaper Laundry on a near-daily basis. (She's also doing a bunch of baby carrier reviews and giveaways all through the month of October.) Here's what Kim had to say:

I have a few ideas that will definitely help, but it depends on how much Dana wants to invest and also how much she wants to alter her routine.

One solution could be using a prefold belt. This is usually used for practicing Elimination Communication over just the prefold itself. It makes undoing the front flap easier for potty breaks. If you aren't willing to purchase anything new then maybe securing a belt around the cover and prefold will help keep the diaper from slipping off, especially if the Velcro is the culprit. You can find them from EC stores like this one.

Pull on covers that are a good tight fit will work well with an active toddler. Since a two year old can stand up on their own, sometimes it is even easier to use pull on covers for changes as well. Most pull-on covers are made of either fleece or wool. Either of these are great for heavy wetters and are especially good for nighttime. The drawback is that they are thicker than tradition PUL (polyurethane laminate) covers like Thirsties. They are even harder to fit clothing over.

For this reason, you can just buy pants that are fleece or wool. These function as clothing and diaper covers. Wool "longies" as they are called can either be hand-knit or sewn from wool interlock fabric, which is a weave just like T-shirt fabric, with lots of stretch. Interlock is much thinner than knit covers. Fleece is the least expensive option. In fact, some parents have had success with just buying fleece pants from places like Old Navy. The pants needs to fit snugly around the diaper. If you can't find any that would work or they don't work well for you, don't give up. Fleece longies are still relatively inexpensive. Wool longies out of interlock will cost between 30-70 dollars. Sustainable Babyish is a well known brand for Interlock Wool Longies. Fleece longies are around $15-30. You can also find lots of free patterns online if you can sew and would like to make your own. All of these will work well over prefolds.

The last option would be re-evaulating your current diapers and possibly switching brands. There are diapers that have gathered elastic around the back, and even some with gathered elastic at the front. These are going to have tighter waists. Some brands even boast that if you pre-set the size you can use them like "pull-ups." There is also a brand specifically made for that called Antsy Pants. Snap-EZ is a brand with both front and back elastic.

And of course, if you decide you like your old Thristies but they just need new Velcro, there are WAHM's who will replace the velcro for you. This service can cost $2-3.50 each plus shipping. The best way to find someone for this service is to hit up a diapering message board and search the WAHM forum. You might even have luck asking local moms.

Thanks, Kim! Hope it helps, Dana!

Tagless label irritation: Thinking beyond Carter's

Dear ZRecs,

My daughter, who has no other skin issues, is one of the unlucky children who gets a nasty rash from the tagless clothing. While I am so grateful that Carters is being called to the mat (I hope I used that phrase correctly), I am concerned about all the other companies who have gone tagless too. A few weeks ago I put a Circo/Target shirt on DD, which had a small stenciled tag. By the end of the day the tag-spot on her back looked like red sandpaper.

If tagless tags are the wave of the future, do I have to research each company’s tags to figure out if the inks are Oko-Tex certified? And can I be certain Oko-Tex certified shirts won’t cause a rash? I appreciate all the information that ZRecs has already gleaned and would be more than happy to support ZRecs tag-testing efforts.

Ava

Ava, you've just articulated one of the big reasons this issue continues to concern us. Ever since our first reporting on Carter's tagless onesies, we have heard a few reports of Gap, Old Navy, Circo, and other brands causing irritation in children. It seems that this was less widespread, but it is hard to know for sure how many parents might have had experiences with other brands but did not find the forum to share them in the same way that parents of children with Carter's brand clothing did.

We believe that the Carter's issue reflects a blind spot in consumer awareness about potentially harmful chemical exposure of their children. Our ultimate goal is not just to learn what might be in Carter's tagless labels - whether it be those from 2007 which appear to have caused the most widespread problems, or those from 2008 that appear to have caused some ongoing problems, or those in 2009 that are still not certified as being free of a wide range of harmful chemicals - but what might be in tagless labels in general that should concern us.

We have two posts planned on the Carter's tagless situation as we work on firm plans for testing; one of these posts will discuss how tagless inks are made and applied to clothing, and why certification standards are so important to protect not just highly sensitive children but all infants and toddlers from unnecessary exposure to sketchy chemicals we wouldn't dream of accepting in their toys, skin care products, or even the fabrics of their garments.

Help me take this thing apart

Dear ZRecs,

You mentioned in an earlier post that Munchkin straw cups were easy to take apart and clean, but I can't figure out how to disassemble it! Can you show us?

Stumped Mom

No problem, SM! The flip-top lid has a small nubbin on either side that fits into two indentations in the main lid. By putting a little pressure on the flip-top at the right angle, you can release it from these indentations, remove it, and get everywhere for cleaning. The trick is knowing which way to replace it - the cut-out for the straw should be oriented away from the hole the straw comes through from below. Here's a quick video demo:


OK, this next one is a reconstruction, because we lost the letter. You know who you are.

Rabbits on a train

Dear ZRecs,

I love the look of the Playmobil bunnies set, but my son or daughter will only be interested in it if the bunnies fit in Geotrax trains. They don't have to fit in the engines, but at least knowing that they fit in the open cars would be enough to make them a viable toy for my child. Can you tell me if they fit?

A Crazy Reader

Crazy Reader, you are in luck! They do fit in Geotrax train cars. They also can do something very fun in the Geotrax train station, which Z was very interested in showing you. Those photos are at the end of this slide show.

Telling it like it is* on BPA

Dear ZRecs,

Not new to zrecs BUT...had a question. Here's a new one...when buying Take N Toss cups with the Sesame Street characters on them, the packaging said "BPA Free*" with the asterisk. Looked a bit more closely and it says "*polycarbonate and epoxy free" so what exactly are they protecting themselves from with the "*"? Any ideas? I didn't buy them... just in case. This whole thing is so frustrating. You basically have to do enough research to support a senior thesis in order to buy cups! Thanks guys, as usual!

AJsMomma

Sharp eye, AJsMomma. Our suspicion is that The First Years has realized that there are potential lawsuits in making the statement that any product is "free" of any chemical. Given how long it takes products produced and packaged in a factory to actually make it onto store shelves, they were probably pretty prescient in taking the step they did; the asterisk covers the known sources of BPA used in production of plastics but also protects them from trace levels being found in, say, polypropylene.

You could look at this as a cynical ploy to sneak some BPA into our sippy cups, but we suspect this is probably a good faith effort on their part to make the claim they can reasonably make while protecting their brand from situations that are beyond the control of a company that wants to produce products at the volume, price point, and relative priority the company places on chemical savviness - in other words, high, cheap, and relatively low.

There are companies out there that have their finger more closely on the pulse of what exactly is happening chemically in their products - Thinkbaby, whose products were the only to test at non-detect levels in every study Health Canada did, are the most obvious example of this - so ultimately it becomes a question of what kind of a brand you want to be doing business with. I'd say if you need cheap products to have a bunch around, avoid brands you know are bad actors in this space first, and The First Years isn't the worst company to trust with your child's health. If you want to go further, get cozy with a BPA-free brand that knows their products' chemical makeup backwards and forwards and can vouch for it a little more aggressively.

Have a question you'd like us to answer? Email us at editors@zrecs.com with "Ask ZRecs" in the subject line, and we'll consider it for a future Q&A. Sign photo by Laura K. Gibbs, shared via Flickr.

Editor's Note: Don't miss our breaking news regarding Gaiam’s BPA admission after reading this post.

Gaiam may be best known among the public at large as a retailer of all things yoga in an age that can't get enough of low-impact, vaguely spiritual forms of exercise. But being the U.S.'s largest creator and distributor of fitness and yoga DVDs (Gaiam owns more than half of the U.S. market, has over 7,000 store-within-a-store displays at major retailers nationwide, and distributes tens of milions of direct-mail catalogs a year) and one of the country's top retailers of reusable aluminum water bottles (one industry source ZRecs spoke with considered them the second or third biggest player in the metal water bottle market, depending on whether you consider the now-shamed SIGG to be down for the count) - that's just the beginning.

Gaiam's gift has always been selling products using original (and often high-quality) content, and in the last decade Gaiam has become as much of a media empire as a retail giant. The company is a prolific pillar of the LOHAS community ("lifestyles of health and sustainability," a term Gaiam's founder coined in the 1990s to better describe their customer than the not-quite-right "cultural creatives,"), thanks in part to acquisitions of the Lime.com content site (ranked among the top 35,000 websites worldwide by Alexa.com), Gaiam's absorption of Whole Foods' ailing WholePeople.com site in exchange for a minority stake in the content-rich direct retail portal Gaiam.com (yep, Whole Foods owns 49.9% of Gaiam.com), and Gaiam also purchased the biggest LOHAS community site online (Gaia.com, which boasts nearly 300,000 members and contributes to Gaiam.com's ranking in the top 3,000 websites, according to Alexa).

In other words, if you have a sustainable bone in your body (and for your sake, I certainly hope that you do!) you probably interact with someone who is drawing their paycheck from Gaiam.

So here's where I spell it out. Millions of U.S. consumers were shocked and dismayed to discover that SIGG aluminum water bottles contained "trace amounts" of bisphenol-A, particularly because they had purchased those bottles thinking they were making a healthy and environmentally responsible choice. BPA is bad for people and it is bad for marine life, at a minimum. If that's why people bought SIGG bottles, I'm going to guess that it's also why people bought Gaiam's aluminum water bottles.

My goal in this post is to lay out evidence that makes it crystal clear that Gaiam is doing exactly what SIGG did prior to their announcement that their water bottles contained BPA. Whether Gaiam is working on a solution to this problem, as SIGG reportedly spent two years doing and then another year rolling out while consumers continued to buy their BPA-containing bottles under questionable assumptions - well, that's anyone's guess, at least for now. But I suspect that a lot of people, like me, expected more from a company that has claimed the title of cultural visionary on health and on personal, if not corporate, transparency.

First, I'll show why we believe Gaiam is not telling you the whole story about their aluminum water bottles and the endocrine-disrupting, yogi-hating chemical we like to call "the big B." I'll source and provide links throughout. Then I'll tell you why this situation bothers us as much as, if not more than, the hard truths we learned about SIGG.

Gaiam marketed their aluminum water bottles as BPA-free six months ago. Why'd they stop?

This is a scan from Gaiam's printed Spring 2009 catalog showing the description of Gaiam's aluminum water bottles.

Our BPA-free aluminum water bottle keeps your water clear and fresh, while keeping disposable water bottles out of landfills. Generous, 20-oz. size with ring-top screw cap (Grass features sports top). Choose from six new designs. 9 3/4" H x 2 3/4" diameter. China.

Here's a link to a PDF we uploaded of the catalog cover and interior page.

Here's a scan from the printed Fall 2009 catalog. Note the change:

Now in even fresher designs and colors, our exclusive aluminum bottles keep your water clear and fresh, while keeping disposable water bottles out of landfills. Generous, lightweight bottle with ring-top screw cap (Grass features sports top) is 100% recyclable. 750 ml. 9 3/4" H x 2 3/4" diameter. Hand wash. China.

Here's a link to that one.

The product page for Gaiam's aluminum water bottle with "Rocky Mountain" graphics, as viewed on Friday, Sept. 25, 2009, appeared identical to that of every other aluminum water bottle Gaiam sells. Here's a direct link to the page.

From the "Product Description" tab: "Reusable, leak-proof aluminum bottles keep your water free from harmful plastic residues."

From the "Product Story" section:

Why Aluminum?
- 86% of plastic water bottles used in the United States end up in landfills, taking up to 1,000 years to biodegrade.
- Transporting bottled water consumes approximately 1.5 million barrels of fossil fuels per year. Help reduce this number by carrying a refillable bottle.
- Americans are currently adding 30 million PET water bottles to our landfills every day.
- When you use an aluminum bottle, your water remains free of unhealthy plastic residues.
Sources: American Recycling Institute and Natural Resources Defense Council.

And, a little further down:

Gaiam bottles are coated with a thin, food-grade epoxy resin that meets the Food & Drug Administration (FDA) 175.300 requirements for toxic elements in foodware. FDA requirements call for testing that meets EPA guidelines. Our manufacturer comprehensively tested the bottle lining, cap and gasket for Bisphenol-A (BPA) using the EPA 3550C method and no detectable levels of BPA were found in the gasket, the cap or the coating material.

Sound familiar?

We don't have screen captures of life before the word "BPA" was banned from Gaiam's aluminum water bottle product descriptions, but we do have something almost as good. Scrubbing a website is hard. Look at these cached (and still live) search results, which link to Gaiam product pages.


Here's a detail shot from those results.



If there is still any doubt in your mind as to whether Gaiam has secretly developed a BPA-free coating for its aluminum water bottles and is just too humble to take credit for it, take a look at the product information they provide for their stainless steel water bottles:


It seems pretty clear to us what Gaiam is up to here. What's more frustrating is that like SIGG, Gaiam has not been shy about profiting from consumers' flight from polycarbonate plastic. Although Gaiam hasn't formally admitted - yet - to their "epoxy resin" lining containing BPA, and could thus be argued to be in a slightly better strategic position than SIGG was after CEO Steve Wasik came clean, we have the clear record of recent claims of their bottles' BPA-free status, which no one turned up in SIGG's case (and SIGG maintains isn't there to be found).

But there are three things about Gaiam's current situation that feel particularly - well, unenlightened.

1. Gaiam's bloggers are not connecting the dots

Numerous Gaiam-funded bloggers have discussed the issue of BPA in water bottles. On the official Gaiam site Gaiam Life, blogger Janet Forgrieve's article "What Type of Reusable Water Bottle Is Best?" appears alongside a "Related Products" column that showcases three Gaiam aluminum water bottles. She writes:

Researchers at the National Institutes of Health are conducting ongoing studies into the effects of the chemical but did release preliminary data last year showing that neonatal exposure to low levels of BPA in rats caused cancerous growths.

Manufacturers and retailers that sell plastic bottles in the United States reacted by switching over to BPA-free polycarbonate bottles.

Should you switch to a metal water bottle?
You can avoid plastics altogether with a reusable stainless steel or aluminum water bottle. Unlike BPA-free plastics, they’re not made from petroleum products. Metal water bottles are more durable than plastic, and the U.S. Food & Drug Administration requires that aluminum bottles sold in America be lined to eliminate the possibility of metals leaching into the drinking water inside.

She went on to conclude that "To do right by both your health and your planet, grab a BPA-free reusable water bottle made of the most eco-friendly material you can find." In our view, the circle of inference was complete.

In a republished "EarthTalk" column - "Are plastic water bottles a health hazard?" - also published on Gaiam Life, the anonymous authors were more direct:

Studies have indicated that food and drinks stored in such containers - including those ubiquitous clear Nalgene water bottles hanging from just about every hiker's backpack - can contain trace amount of Bisphenol A (BPA), a synthetic chemical that interferes with the body’s natural hormonal messaging system. ... According to the Environment California Research & Policy Center, which reviewed 130 studies on the topic, BPA has been linked to breast and uterine cancer, an increased risk of miscarriage, and decreased testosterone levels. BPA can also wreak havoc on children’s developing systems. (Parents beware: Most baby bottles and sippy cups are made with plastics containing BPA.)

Most experts agree that the amount of BPA that could leach into food and drinks through normal handling is probably very small, but there are concerns about the cumulative effect of small doses.

Safer choices include bottles crafted from safer HDPE (plastic #2), low-density polyethylene (LDPE, AKA plastic #4) or polypropylene (PP, or plastic #5). Consumers may have a hard time finding water bottles made out of #4 or #5, however. Aluminum and stainless steel water bottles are also safe choices and can be reused repeatedly and eventually recycled.

(The link, of course, takes BPA-concerned readers to Gaiam's online store.)

Either of these examples are hard to fault their authors for - although both are undated, it's likely they were written months before our collective post-SIGG hangover.

Things are not so rosy on Lime. Belinda Miller's "SIGG, How Could You?" is a case where it's hard to imagine publishing a piece under that masthead - it says it right there, "A GAIAM COMPANY" - without doing a little pondering.

I wrote about Sigg back in 2006 and was specifically impressed that they did not leach toxic residue into liquids. I trusted their claims about their "proprietary water-based resin"... baked onto the aluminum bottle. Exceeding FDA standards, Sigg asserts that the "liner is safe, petroleum-products free, and will not leach aluminum or any synthetic residue." Now I see that they did not specifically say they didn’t contain BPAs, but they certainly committed a sin of omission given that parents all over were freaking out about BPA and they positioned themselves as a safe option. I was new to my Momster mission, and more trusting that companies wouldn’t lie just to sell product. And we’ve used our Sigg bottles continuously since, blissfully ignorant. ... So now Sigg says that yes, bottles made before 2008 did contain BPA, but they still didn’t leach BPA. But their new liners are BPA-free. So, I feel kinda OK that they don’t leach harmful chemicals, but really mad that Sigg led us to believe that their bottles were BPA-free. And can I trust them now? It’s a frustrating world if you’re asking questions and trying to be aware.

Indeed.

2. Gaiam's customer service department is still stating, if pressed, that their bottles are BPA-free

We documented three calls to Gaiam's customer service over the course of three days. Our statements below are paraphrased, because we weren't writing those down. The customer service reps' statements are direct quotes.

Our first call reached Tiffany, a customer service representative who was very friendly and helpful. I asked her whether Gaiam bottles contained BPA, because SIGG had had some problems with that. "Really?" she said. "Yes," I said. "And I was calling to find out if Gaiam aluminum water bottles use BPA, too."

"Gaiam bottles are BPA-free."

"Really?" I asked. "What does that mean, exactly?"

Tiffany laughed. "It means they are not made with BPA."

Our second call hit their after-hours call center, some third party they outsource to. I didn't ask the customer service representative's name.

"Do Gaiam aluminum water bottles contain BPA?" I asked him.

"Just a minute," he said. He put me on hold and came back a minute or so later and said, "Gaiam bottles are coated with a thin, food-grade epoxy resin that meets the Food & Drug Administration (FDA) 175.300 requirements for toxic elements in foodware. FDA requirements call for testing that meets EPA guidelines. Our manufacturer comprehensively tested the bottle lining, cap and gasket for Bisphenol-A (BPA) using the EPA 3550C method and no detectable levels of BPA were found in the gasket, the cap or the coating material."

Me: "Yes, I saw that on the website. I don't really understand what that means."

CSR: "It means that the liner itself has been tested by the FDA and has been tested for BPA."

Me: "But that doesn't tell me if there was BPA used to make it. Is there BPA in the lining?"

CSR: "It's not in it, basically. There's no BPA in them at all."

We tried another call with the day shift, with Jenni placing the call this time in case we got Tiffany again. We didn't. We got Pam. In our exchange with Pam, she used all of the following phrases: "Food-grade epoxy," "resin polymer," and "What is BPA?" Again, when pressed, we got the information we seemed to be looking for. "It does not have it," she said.

3. Gaiam won't tell us the sensitivity of their BPA testing, let alone answer the question "Do they contain BPA?"

We contacted Gaiam through multiple channels in an attempt to get testing data that would show us the sensitivity of BPA testing they did on their aluminum bottles, despite the fact that SIGG's example has proven that this is a poor substitute for transparency regarding the materials used in the production of the product, information every company has ready access to.

We contacted Gaiam's internal marketing department. We called CEO Lynn Powers' office directly. We passed messages to Gaiam through multiple levels of their PR agency. We asked for excerpted details from their testing data, for any information that might contradict our assessment of the situation, and finally for a simple public statement about the issue we were about to raise in this post. We outlined the evidence we had accumulated and told them they could respond proactively, or reactively.

Gaiam, one of the world's most proactive companies since its founding in the mid-1970s, has chosen to react.

The customers are coming

As we prepared this article for publication, we went through the reviews and customer questions in every aluminum water bottle listing on Gaiam.com, wondering if we'd turn up any interesting statements from Gaiam officials. What we found, instead, was a silence that is revealing a company that practically owns the term "Conscious Consumerism" as distant, opaque, and out-of-touch.

This is what is beautiful about the Internet - unanswered questions [link|screenshot], the volumes spoken by silence, and consumers' ultimate refusal, however long in coming, to accept the mantra "Trust us" as any way to live. (Follow the link above if you'd like to ask second one industrious customer's unanswered question.)

Here's a slideshow of screen captures from many of the pages discussed in this article:



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Editor's Note: Don't miss our breaking news regarding Gaiam’s BPA admission after reading this post.

One challenge in publishing a consumer research blog is that we sometimes get information off the record. We regularly point readers to the ZRecs Guide because it allows us to assign "confidence" ratings, which we often cite as allowing us to consider a company's track record when evaluating statements they make. What we don't usually like to spell out is that we also base our confidence ratings, at times, on information we have acquired but cannot publish.

BPA researcher Frederick vom Saal's statements in an article in The Star today have given us the opportunity to let something come out that we weren't previously at liberty to share. Vom Saal stated that he tested SIGG bottles several years ago and found leaching in the parts per trillion range. Based on an agreement we have made with a party that provided us with testing data off the record during our investigation of SIGG last month, we are now able to share some information that we believe independently supports Vom Saal's claim.

Two out of two labs agree: SIGGs leached BPA

Two weeks ago, we were provided with BPA leach testing results for a SIGG water bottle purchased in July, that had SIGG's older, BPA-containing liner. The test was conducted in a 3% acetic acid solution at 40 degrees Celsius, with a stated limit on quantitation (minimum detection level) of .5 parts per billion, or 500 parts per trillion. The bottle was found to leach BPA at 1.25 micrograms per liter, which is roughly equivalent to 1.25 parts per billion. In relative terms, this is more than what Vom Saal states he had found, although he has not yet provided many details of his tests. In absolute terms, both values are very, very small. Everyone - you included - is exposed to BPA at higher levels from other sources, many of them entirely outside of your control. Canned foods tested by the Environmental Working Group contained up to 385 ppb, and even if you avoid those, there are plenty of others. Labs testing water bottles for BPA have to correct for background BPA in the water - sometimes up to 2 ppb. (We have confirmed, for the record, that this test made such a correction as a matter of standard procedure.)

As for SIGG's specific situation, we aren't sure this is particularly damning. They tested to 2 ppb - a level that others in the industry, including company heads we know to be aggressive in their own testing and have no love lost with SIGG, told us was a reasonable threshold for commercial testing of a product. Spinning this into "0.0% leaching," as SIGG often did, is another story.

How can we get more information on the record?

Most of the information we accept off the record is product testing data we would never get otherwise. We scrutinize it carefully, and if it checks out, we may negotiate with the provider of the information to see if there is some way we can use the information that protects their anonymity. In this case, there was no agreement that worked for both sides until Vom Saal went public with his own testing, at which point our source agreed to let us share the findings and the methodology of the testing they had performed, although we agreed to continue to protect the name of the lab and the source of the information.

Accepting information off the record is never ideal, but it allows us access to a lot of information we can use indirectly to provide guidance to consumers through our listings in the ZRecs Guide. We encourage you to pay attention to product listings that are not flagged for a chemical but have "low" confidence assigned to that status, as well as products you might have believed were free of BPA or some other chemical but are flagged as containing it. Most of these are based on our knowledge of a company's track record of trustworthiness, but some are based on information we have acquired but are not in a position to share.

There is another way to get around off-the-record testing: Testing products ourselves based on good leads. The problem is that that costs money. We considered testing an older SIGG bottle for BPA so we could get a clean lab result we could share openly, but it would have cost about $350 that we do not have.

But we have been thinking about a different way of doing testing to find out things that our community of readers want to know. What if ZRecs readers were willing to contribute small amounts to a fund that would test a product we believe, for reasons we cannot disclose, is highly likely to contain a harmful substance its manufacturer believes claims it is free of? What if ZRecs as a community engaged in grassroots product testing?

We'll be making an offer to ZRecs readers to do just that very soon.

More on this story

• SIGG's BPA Confession


• Two warnings before you request a replacement SIGG bottle


• The ZRecs 2009 BPA-Free Water Bottle Showdown


• ZRecs evidence of misleading statements by SIGG representatives


• our interview with SIGG CEO Steve Wasik

Update: Heard about Gaiam's BPA problem?

Swiss sports and children's bottle maker SIGG has admitted what many consumer advocates have suspected for years, but never proven: That the epoxy lining used for years in SIGG bottles - which they secretly swapped out for a new liner last summer - contained the hormone-disrupting chemical bisphenol-A. There's more to the story than that, but the bottom line is that this company is in a very vulnerable position, and there are a couple of factors that will make it hard for them to claim the high road on this issue.

Which bottle do I have?

Let's figure out what you have - if you have any SIGG water bottles, I'm guessing that's the first thing you want to know.

If you own SIGG bottles you purchased before August 2008, you definitely have one with the old liner. But even SIGG bottles that are less than a year old don't necessarily have the new liner. In fact, SIGG's announcement may be somewhat conveniently timed - it can take several months for products to move through the supply chain, and if I were a betting man I'd bet that many of the SIGG bottles with the BPA-containing liner were being sold as late as this spring.

But it's easy to compare them by sight alone. The old version of the liner is very brassy looking, like the inside of a can of tomatoes. The new liner is dull and beige.


As a case in point, a product sample SIGG sent us in the fall of 2008 actually has the old liner.

SIGG's slippery claims

Consumer groups have been alleging since at least 2007 that SIGG bottles are lined with a BPA-containing epoxy, and on the face of it the claim makes sense - SIGG bottles are aluminum, after all, the same material used in canned foods, infant formula, and soda that have been second-class citizens in the debate over BPA exposure. SIGG, in turn, maintained that their bottles did not leach BPA, but that they could not disclose the formula for the liner because it was made by someone else. It is important to note here that they did not claim not to know what was in the formula, only that they could not or would not reveal it. As SIGG Switzerland CEO Steve Wasik explained it in April 2008:

SIGG has proprietary rights with a 3rd party producer of our liner formula. In other words, we do not produce it ourselves. This supplier is based in Switzerland and has an impeccable reputation for quality and safety. SIGG is the only water bottle on the market to use this special liner. As there are many copy-cat manufacturers in the market (most based in China) that would like to get their hands on this formula, our supplier has an agreement with SIGG to keep his formula confidential.

Because we know that this liner is the very best on the market and we have had a positive working relationship with this supplier, we have honored that agreement.

With that context in mind, let's jump back to early 2007, when the Environmental Working Group published a guide to BPA-free products that listed SIGG water bottles as containing BPA. SIGG responded by demanding that the organization either furnish proof that this was true or remove SIGG from its list. Listen to the very carefully crafted language of then-SIGG USA president Wasik:

On March 9th, it was brought to my attention that a website sponsored by the Environmental Working Group (EWG) made mention that SIGG bottles contain plastic liners with bisphenol A (BPA).

I can assure you that SIGG bottles are absolutely not made with a plastic liner and are in fact lined with a proprietary non-toxic, water-based resin which has been refined over decades of study and is extremely safe & stable.

Based on the confidence we have in our product backed by numerous laboratory studies, we questioned the EWG and requested that they provide us with the testing they have conducted on SIGG - or alternatively to remove the "SIGG" mention from their website if they have not tested SIGG. Within 24 hours of this request, the EWG removed SIGG's name from their report. [Via Eco Child's Play]

I encourage you to read those paragraphs again. There are great ravines of fact bridged by carefully chosen inference. And they helped ensure that SIGG benefited mightily from the rampant purchases of aluminum and stainless steel water bottles Americans made in 2007 and 2008 to replace their Nalgene and other polycarbonate sports bottles. Where would SIGG have been if they had admitted to having BPA in their product at the time, but assured consumers that it would not leach out?

Meanwhile, the Organic Consumers Association had picked up the SIGG contains BPA claim, and reported that consumers should avoid SIGG bottles along with many other known BPA-containing products. They published this in the March 8, 2007 issue of their newsletter, Organic Bytes.

But SIGG was edited out of that document, too - even the PDF version of the newsletter! - after an unspecified party alerted the OCA to SIGG's counter-claim. In the next issue of Organic Bytes, editors Craig Minowa and Ronnie Cummins wrote:

In Issue #104, we ran a piece with quick tips on how to avoid toxic BPA. One of our bullet points mentioned avoiding SIGG water bottles (among other brands). We acquired that information from the Environmental Working Group. Unfortunately, the data was slightly dated. SIGG has since gone BPA-free, so it is now safe to purchase SIGG water bottles.

SIGG began releasing independent testing showing that its bottles leached no BPA in tests that mimicked liquids like colas, fruit juices, and water. These tests don't appear to be any different from the kinds of tests Canada would do if SIGG wanted to import bottles with that liner into our BPA-banning neighbor's home turf - put the material up against a liquid, wait, and see what comes out. In other words, Health Canada and anyone else who regulates BPA will not test for the presence of BPA in the material itself; they will test to see if BPA comes out of the material. It is entirely conceivable that a material could be made using BPA but be so well-engineered and so carefully used that it does not leach BPA, and that appears to be what SIGG accomplished with its third-party provider.

Still, things seemed a little funny. As Amelia Royko Maurer of the green online shop Free Market Organics wrote in an undated page of notes and clippings on her website:

When I bought my first Sigg bottle, I called the company up and asked what the liner was all about. They said something like they were working on a patent and could not yet reveal what it was. So I waited and wrote again. Then I would just periodically check in at their website to see if they had given the answer yet. Finally one day it said the liner was a "water based epoxy resin". If you look today, they have removed the word epoxy, but the funny thing is, none of their other retailers have, which looks a little obvious, especially since their descriptions of it all match accept for the missing word "epoxy." They mention that it is not plastic - which is true, nonetheless, BPA is used to make most epoxy resins. [Link]

For much of this period, we assumed that SIGG was either bluffing about knowing whether the product was made using BPA (it wouldn't sound very good to admit you were using a coating but weren't entitled to the formula, would it?) or that there was some strange legal quandary that prevented them from coming out and explicitly saying their product was BPA-free. (Incidentally, many companies that have been selling products as BPA-free must now wrestle with some of those questions.) Because of these unanswered questions, we chose not to flag SIGG bottles with BPA as a "chemical of concern" in the ZRecs Guide, but flagged our level of confidence in the information provided by the company as "Low," because it was clear SIGG was failing to disclose something, although we couldn't be certain what.

We'll be changing it soon to reflect SIGG's new revelation, so this is for posterity:


Despite this "Low" confidence rating, we trusted (and continue to trust) their third-party testing. It isn't the stuff of peer-reviewed scientific journals, but it's the kind of data companies have to submit to government agencies to certify their products. It describes the methods used and provides a lot of detail. And Z has used SIGG sippys off and on for years. We have no concerns about BPA exposure, based on the test results.

But that doesn't mean we like the way SIGG does business.

Whether or not you are comfortable using a bottle that contains but does not leach BPA, for us the real story here is how a company using BPA that would have been absolutely sidelined by consumers seeking BPA-free alternatives managed to make itself a central player by carefully controlling information about its products, challenging consumer advocacy organizations when they made statements that were unproven but that the company knew to be true, and "coming clean" only when it suited its own purposes.

Now SIGG CEO Wasik has proudly announced on SIGG's U.S. website:

Within the scientific community, the safety of the packaging ingredient bisphenol A (BPA) remains the subject of considerable debate and controversy as evidenced by the FDA meetings on the topic this month. For decades, BPA has been the industry standard for protective coatings – approved by food and health regulators around the world. One year ago, Andrew von Eschenbach, the Commissioner of the FDA, announced that, "The science we have reviewed does not justify recommending that anyone discontinue using products containing BPA." At that time, SIGG Switzerland, the world leader in premium reusable bottles, had already made the transition into bottles that are BPA free.

(Of course, it wasn't long before we all became painfully aware of how cozy the FDA and industry were during that time. But let's not quibble over details.)

Within the reusable bottle water category, polycarbonate plastic bottles (#7) came under scrutiny in early 2008 because they were found to leach BPA. As a result, many consumers turned to metal bottles (aluminum and stainless steel) because these bottles had no issues with BPA migration. Prior to its transition, SIGG utilized a water-based epoxy liner which contained a trace amount of BPA. The bottles were thoroughly and regularly tested in both the USA and Switzerland and all tests revealed absolutely no migration or leaching of BPA or any other substance from the protective inner liner. These tests have been public information on the SIGG website for several years and remain there today.

Despite the fact that these bottles were manufactured well within strict international regulations and posed no health risk, my team and I initiated a project in June 2006 to develop a new liner which would be both BPA free and produced in a more environmentally friendly manner. We recognized early that there were questions surrounding BPA and we wanted to be sure that we had a bottle liner that you, our customers, could have absolute confidence in.

After two years of comprehensive testing and development and a one million dollar investment in new equipment for our Swiss factory, SIGG began producing bottles with our new, next generation "EcoCare" liner in August 2008. Providing the same quality and protection afforded by the previous liner, this new powder-based, co-polyester coating has been thoroughly tested and is certified to be 100% free of BPA... [Link]

WTF SIGG?

August 2008? Yep, SIGG has been sitting on this news for a year. Why? Well, one reason a reasonable person might assume would be a factor is that the overwhelming majority of SIGG bottles made with the old liner have now moved through what is probably a year-long supply chain of production, distribution, and brick-and-mortar and online sales. SIGG offers a product line of dizzying variety sold at premium prices, and they are probably slow to move. But of course that is not the real reason!

The primary reason that I am writing this letter today is because I believe that the BPA conversation has changed dramatically in the last 12 months. Last year, the primary concern was that of BPA leaching from bottles. Since that time the dialogue has evolved such that now some people are concerned about the mere presence of BPA and some states are considering legislation.

But how much trust can consumers spare for a company that operates this way? Does this chain of events lead you to have "absolute confidence" in SIGG's desire to meet your expectations - and to protect your health?

As Alicia at online retailer The Soft Landing put it in a post yesterday about her company's experiences with SIGG that ultimately led her to stop selling them in her online shop:

We’re not interested in dealing with another used car salesman. There are too many other top notch water bottle companies out there! It’s not about the "mere presence of BPA" or that their studies didn’t show any leaching - it’s about the principle of trust. We as parents, consumers and advocates should demand transparency from companies who build their entire foundation on being healthy and green.

We'd be very surprised if SIGG wasn't prepared for some kind of backlash. The question is, how big will it be? We want to know what you think about this issue. Does this news anger you? Or do you think this is the only way a business could handle this kind of transition, and applaud SIGG for "taking the lead" in making a safer aluminum container lining?

Tomorrow I'll talk a bit about what we find really shocking about SIGG's strategy to minimize the flight of consumers from its brand. It's a move that could shake things up the backrooms of the children's products industry and yield a lot of new, but not necessarily enlightening, claims and counter-claims about various products' safety.

New to ZRecs? Find out what we do in this list of our best recent consumer reporting and reviewing.

Updates to this story

• Two warnings before you request a replacement SIGG bottle


• The ZRecs 2009 BPA-Free Water Bottle Showdown


• ZRecs evidence of misleading statements by SIGG representatives


• our interview with SIGG CEO Steve Wasik


• BPA researcher claims older SIGGs did leach BPA, and we can independently confirm it

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SIGG's public statements about BPA

"SIGG's Bottle Liner"
publication date unknown, received by ZRecs on March 18, 2008

SIGG Bottle Liner


"Former Liner Full Report, BPA Leach Testing, June 2007"
publication date unknown, received by ZRecs on March 18, 2008

Former Liner Full Report BPA Leach Testing June 2007


"SIGG Quality Guarantee"
released April 15, 2008

SIGG Quality Guarantee- April 15, 2008


"EcoCare Swiss Testing Feb 2008"
released August 2009

EcoCare Swiss Testing Feb 2008

The current status of bisphenol-A, which is teetering somewhere between near-unilateral corporate disavowal and a patchwork of outright bans, is what it is because we - parents, consumers, and part-time, practical activists - made it that way. That means we also have the power to decide what Health Canada's discovery of trace levels of BPA in non-polycarbonate bottles means to us. And the choice we make as consumers can have a big impact on whether there is a bright future ahead for "BPA-free."

We disagree with the argument that you should not be worried because the study is flawed. Yes, the study needs to be replicated. But our primary concerns - the apparent lack of a control and the lack of disclosure of detailed information - have both been cleared up. We now have all the data, an explanation of how they established a control group (in glass!), and the bottom line is, HC probably correctly identified that there are trace quantities of BPA in "BPA-free" products.

The question is, what does this mean?

In the week following the release of this report data we have seen some bloggers working to publicize it in as sensational a manner as possible. Worse, we have seen hardworking brands dedicated to providing the safest products possible declared to be liars who acted in bad faith by presenting BPA-containing products to consumers as BPA-free.

We don't see it that way, for a couple of reasons.

First, these levels are really, really, really small. The highest levels of BPA detected in non-polycarbonate plastics was under 2% of that found in polycarbonate, and that was found in pure water. In a 10% ethanol solution, which is more comparable to breast milk or formula, there was no detectable amount.

Second, non-polycarbonate bottles aren't the only place you wouldn't expect to find BPA, but will. Remember, this BPA probably came from dust present in the manufacturing facilities where the bottles were made. Trace amounts of BPA have been detected in drinking water (the Health Canada study corrected for it), and in human breast milk, not to mention infant formula (in higher quantities still). If you use recycled toilet paper, there is probably BPA in it, because there is BPA in the heat-sensitive paper used in credit card receipts, which is a significantly recycled paper product, and for all we know there could be BPA in dust in paper mills as well. It is the very ubiquity of harmful chemicals in our environment that make them, on the whole, so worthy of excommunication from the chemistry of our lives.

In other words, if a study that showed virtually every non-PC baby bottle on the market during lengthy exposure to fatty liquid simulants showing a complete non-detect for BPA has you worried, you're missing the forest for the trees.

We say all this from the perspective of people who have helped shepherd people through an intense period of consumer self-examination. After reporting for a while on BPA leaching from polycarbonate bottles, mainstream media interest and coverage of the issue picked up, and a couple of watershed announcements got everyone searching online for answers. At its peak we had parents emailing us daily telling us they could not sleep because they had poisoned their babies and asking how could they get the poison out. It got to the point where we spent more time reassuring people that their children were going to survive than we did recommending safer bottles and sippy cups. But when you're talking about sperm counts, anogenital distances, possible links to upticks in diabetes or other problems, the specter of an unknown relationship to long-term cancer risk, and effects on fish and wildlife, you are not talking about children being poisoned by their own parents, you are talking about a population and an environment that is being subjected to exposure to a chemical that should be swiftly retired from the scene.

For that reason, many activists, including Z Recommends, Non-Toxic Kids, Eco Child's Play, the Environmental Working Group, SafeMama, and many others, worked hard from the start to address this issue on all fronts: To encourage consumers to buy products that were not made with polycarbonate plastic or were free of BPA using widely-validated methods of detection; to pressure companies to educate themselves about chemicals in their products, to allow ZRecs to share that information with consumers, and to find alternatives to BPA-containing plastics, which were usually quite close at hand; and to tell Congress that we as consumers believed this substance should be legislatively removed from the market.

In that case, the mass parental freak-out had a net positive effect. Parents abandoned BPA-rich polycarbonate plastic in droves, migrated to new companies using safer plastics or to glass bottles, and their children are genuinely better off for it. And ultimately, companies decided it was not worth their time to battle for a plastic that parents didn't believe in anymore, and they gave it up.

But this time, it's different. If you, as a parent, choose to freak out about trace amounts of BPA found in bottles not made using it, at levels far below the sensitivity of any prior established testing method and far below the level banned by the country at the forefront of BPA regulation (Canada); if you choose to demonize companies that have tried to protect your children from BPA, and done a very good job of it; and if there are enough parents who join you in freaking out about it, you will make every company that went into BPA-free products and had the temerity to say as much wish they had never had anything to do with you. You will make them wish they had continued to ignore and defy and work around you until you got so disgusted with the so-called responsiveness of the free-market system to consumer choice that you fed your children out of borosilicate test tubes.

We have read a few breathless accounts of the demonic duplicity of companies like Medela, Born Free, and Adiri, who are now "not really" BPA-free, and to those with such misplaced hostility we say: What planet are you on? We'd suggest you - as a consumer, a parent, and an advocate for change - do the same. The same parents who led the charge for change in the marketplace (change that has come to us, by leaps and bounds, over the past year) have the power to say, We have realistic expectations and reasonable concerns.

And from the looks of it, that's where this situation seems headed. Parents are not (at the moment) freaking out about these trace readings - perhaps because they understand the data, or perhaps because Health Canada took such pains to explain that they weren't worried.

What BPA-free will ultimately mean

We believe the U.S. government, if and when it gets around to regulating estrogenic chemicals like BPA, will have to set levels of tolerance, not outright bans. Like lead, phthalates, and other chemicals we wish to regulate for the protection of human health, we must set a level of "free-ness" that will be a clear standard to which companies will be held. Otherwise, "free" will be a slippery term dependent on the capabilities of scientists to measure, rather than the ability of companies to perform up to established expectations.

Companies have a right to expect this kind of treatment, and companies that have taken the lead in providing BPA-free products should be prepared to be the leaders on this, too. Our job as consumers and activists is to let them know that we're ready to hear that conversation happen whenever it needs to happen, and we will continue to support the companies that have supported our needs and our concerns. If you agree, don't be shy about it. If others dogpile on companies whose commitment to providing safer products for your children has made a positive difference in your life, say so.

It will still be up to the scientists to determine what level of exposure to chemicals like BPA may cause harm. But we do not believe a zero tolerance approach is a practical response, and we also don't believe that "BPA-free" must mean zero tolerance now and to whatever decimal place technicians can arrive at, any more than "fat-free" means truly free of fat or "phthalate-free" means truly free of phthalates (in fact, it means it has less than 0.1%).

If additional testing confirms the trace levels of BPA found in these non-polycarbonate products, we will flag items in the ZRecs Guide to Safer Children's Products to alert parents to that fact, but with the caveat that we don't think these levels should currently be seen as a concern. Unless and until established and realistic levels for what "BPA-free" means indicate that a given product doesn't meet the standard, we will not be changing our labeling of these products in the ZRecs Guide from "BPA-free" to mark them as containing BPA. The levels are too low, and the results too uncertain, for that to be either useful to consumers or fair to companies.