Producer restricts sale of packaging chemical

BPA is used in baby bottles to make them shatter proof and is also used in the internal protective linings for food and beverage cans.

Sunoco stated in a letter to investors that it is requiring its customers to guarantee that its BPA will not be used in food and water containers for children under the age of three.

The move from the chemical company follows the recent announcement that six major baby bottle manufacturers in the US plan to stop using the chemical.

Chemical industry ​

Meanwhile the American Chemistry Council (ACC), of which Sunoco is a member, is hard at work defending the use of BPA in food and drink containers as various legislators around the US aim to ban the chemical from children's products.

And the ACC highlights a safety assessment completed last year by the US Food and Drug Administration (FDA), which concluded that 'an adequate margin of safety exists for BPA at current levels of exposure from food contact uses, for infants and adults'.​

Steve Hentges, executive director of the ACC's Polycarbonate/BPA Global Group, said the council and its members that manufacture and use BPA are committed to providing products that protect public health and safety, especially when it comes to children.

“We have and will continue to develop scientific data to inform credible, transparent scientific assessments of BPA so that the public can have the confidence it deserves in the safety of these products,” ​added Hentges.

Call for ban​

US group, the Consumers Union, recently called on the FDA to ban the packaging chemical in children’s products and food containers, claiming that the regulator has enough scientific data to support such a move.

And the FDA's assessment of BPA last summer has been criticised by scientists and US lawmakers.

They claim that the regulator, in its review of the chemical, should have included independent studies that had raised uncertainties about the effects of low dose exposure to BPA in humans, in particular infants.

Excretion of BPA ​

Meanwhile, the European Food Safety Authority (EFSA) claims that exposure to BPA at current levels is safe based on the fact that the human body rapidly metabolises and eliminates the substance; however, a recent University of Rochester Medical Center study challenges that assumption.

The authors of the study looked at levels of the chemical in the urine of 1,469 US adults who took part in Center for Disease Control's National Health and Nutrition Examination Survey (NHANES).

While it had been thought that BPA was rapidly excreted from the body through urine, this study found people who had fasted for even a whole day still had significant levels of the chemical; the researchers said the results suggest that BPA may linger in the body longer than previously known.

Canned beverages ​

However, consumers should not be concerned about exposure to BPA from consumption of canned soft drinks, claims a Canadian study.

The findings, published in the Journal of Agricultural and Food Chemistry​, ​indicated that while most of the drinks analysed contained BPA, the levels present were such that exposure to the packaging chemical was minimal.

The researchers claim the results suggest that BPA levels in soft drinks are low compared to those in other canned foods and they said this could be due to the different coatings used in the two piece easy open cans often used for soft drinks or that the amount of coating applied to soft drink cans may be less than for other foods.

Moreover, a recent Health Canada study also came to similar conclusions about exposure to BPA from canned drinks.