I mentioned something in passing in our plastics conference call yesterday that I figured I'd better follow up on.

At ZRecs we have always maintained - both to concerned consumers and to companies making unsubstantiated claims about the safety of their products - that our goal as consumers and as a society should be to reduce our overall exposure levels to many chemicals, knowing that we will never completely eliminate them, at least not within our lifetimes. The production, use, and waste cycle of these products ensures that chemicals like these are present not only in a huge array of products, but in our environment as well. It is quite likely, for example, that there is some (very small) amount of BPA in your tap water.

Another example, and one most people aren't yet aware of, is paper products. The one I mentioned specifically on the call was toilet paper.

As it turns out (post-call research on my part) 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). Dresden University did a study examining BPA turning up in wastewater streams and traced it back to toilet paper as the culprit. We first learned about this study here and here.

Environmental regulators consider sources like this disconcerting because endocrine-disrupting chemicals like BPA and phthalates can wreak havoc on marine ecosystems. Ultimately, it's sources like these that are the reason you probably have BPA (at extremely low concentrations) in your tap water, too.

The same thing goes for other kinds of recycled paper, too. When we add up all of the sources we now know of, BPA can be found at smaller levels, and less clear exposure levels, than the children's products we have been talking about for some time. These products include:

• Credit card receipts


• Recycled cardboard pizza boxes and paper


• Beer and wine (vats are lined with a BPA-containing resin)


• Rubbermaid polycarbonate-lined baking tins used by Subway


• Soda cans and food cans


• Baby food jars (lids) and formula packaging (metal cans, glass jar lids, and paper packaging foil seals)


• Many non-polycarbonate plastics (including the color-changing plastics used by Sassy and others), in addition to PC

Consumer advocates and reporters like us often avoid raising topics like this for a few, closely-related reasons:

1. Consumers often have difficulty managing their feelings about a given chemical, and think in terms of eliminating individual ones rather than chipping away at the overall chemical load of known harmful substances.


2. We believe not all sources are created equal. BPA is found in many of these products at extremely low levels. Most of these also expose us to BPA in far less obvious ways, if at all, and more research is needed on the dose/effect relationship of different levels of BPA and other endocrine disruptors.


3. We don't want people to feel powerless, or like the changes they make don't make a difference, because, to the best of our understanding of an emerging area of scientific scrutiny, they do make a big difference.

That said, we consider toilet paper to be a specific source of concern, for reasons a polite blogger should probably avoid getting into. Suffice to say that exposure is certain and frequent.

I also mentioned on the call that I don't believe there is currently enough scientific data to warrant fears about melamine tableware, or about chemicals leaching from #1, #2, and #5 plastics. A few isolated studies and alerts have come out on each of these but we believe a lot more rigorous data collection is needed before calling for any changes to regulation or to consumer habits. We may post more specifically about this if there is interest, or wait until we see more data and do so then.

I also discussed how our ability to test for these chemicals at lower and lower levels is steadily advancing, and that the scientific and regulatory community is going to face some challenging questions regarding what constitute acceptable levels of different chemicals. We'll write about that again in a future post.

I'll be participating in a panel discussion and open conference call on Thursday to discuss plastics safety. It's hosted by Healthy Child, Healthy World, and here's the description of the event from HCHW's blog:

Join us for an open, non-judgmental conversation about plastics (we all have our Achilles’ Heel). Janelle from Healthy Child Healthy World will be giving a quick background on the issue; Jennifer from The Smart Mama will share her Journey to Glass; Jeremiah from ZRecs will talk about assessing the risks and benefits of plastics, and how bloggers can influence corporate behavior and affect change in the marketplace; and Beth from Fake Plastic Fish will discuss the impacts on the environment and living without.

You're welcome to join us, because after we each talk for a bit we're going to focus on questions and discussion points from whoever is on the line. A few words of advice:

• DON'T call in and ask me about the safety of a particular bottle, bath toy, or other item you do or don't see in the ZRecs Guide. You will get a blank stare, and blank stares translate very poorly via phone.


• DO call in and ask me about whatever else you want relating to plastics - thoughts on a particular plastic type, recent issues in the news, mainstream media coverage of a plastics issue, or about a position we've taken, or haven't taken, here on Z Recommends. I like being grilled.

I'm going to spend the time I have the floor talking about what I believe the precautionary principle should mean when it comes to plastics in our daily lives, and about how bloggers can make companies change by doing research and reporting. Others on the panel know a thing or two about this, so I'm hoping we all get to do some serious dialoguing. Yep, not a real word.

You can call in at 10 a.m. PT/1 p.m. ET at (218) 339-3600, then punch the access code 1036416 to get in on the conference call. And if you call in and ask a question, mention you're a reader and what your name is. I'd love to put a voice to a name!