Oh! Are you buying BPA-free plastics?
Read this and find the alternative of plastics!
My mother used to check if the products were BPA free or not when she bought anything related to what we use. Now she stopped using plastics so we stopped talking about BPA. But I never thought about what BPA actually is. It sounds bad for our health and that is all I knew…So I decided to check and learned the facts about BPA!
Okay, let’s start with this. What is BPA?
BPA stands for bisphenol A, which is the name of a chemical that has been used to make certain plastics and resins. So why are people worrying about using it? Because it can disrupt normal hormone functions, have possible effects on infants and children's brain development, increased blood pressure and… I will stop there because it goes on and on.
BPA is literally everywhere. It's in water bottles, canned foods, plastic containers and receipts too! Unfortunately, companies are only slowly removing BPA from these products. People tend to choose BPA-free products but is that effort good enough to protect themselves against BPA? Remember, major companies put profit first which can lead to marketing that can sometimes trick people. Of course they will put the words BPA-free if it helps sales. But did you know that BPA has siblings such as BPS, BPF, BPAF, BPZ, BPP and BHPF which they can use interchangeably instead of BPA. But it’s all still bisphenol! Now you know the term BPA-free doesn’t mean bisphenol-free!
In a 2007 study, the Centers for Disease Control showed that 93% of Americans have BPA in their bodies. That news made some people freak out. So companies began to put the BPA-free labels everywhere. Very clever to trick people but actually we are the ones who are buying them. We have to check well before buying to understand exactly what the label means. (Check out our greenwashing article to learn more)
There are several ways to avoid BPA-free products. Avoid buying cans of food and buy glass jar products instead. When you microwave leftovers, use glass instead of plastic. Use a stainless steel water bottle instead of a plastic bottle. That would reduce the amount of taking BPA massively.
Why am I giving this information? Because this knowledge is also one of the ways you can reduce using plastic! It is healthy for you too!
Have you ever heard of the ozone hole? Earth's atmosphere has layers that protect Earth from harmful radiation. In the 1980's scientists discovered that the ozone layer was thinning due to human activities such as using aerosol spray cans and refrigerants. This sounded bad for the Earth. But mostly people freaked out just because they didn’t want to get skin cancer.
After The Montreal Protocol, a global agreement to protect the ozone layer, was made in 1987, the ozone layer slowly recovered over the course of decades and the ozone hole closed in 2021.
It seems like an unrelated story but there is a reason why I brought this up. Humans tend to take action much more quickly if the problem directly affects their health. If people stop using plastics because they realize the chemicals in plastic will be harmful to humans, maybe sharing this information is a good strategy to prevent the use of plastics.
This is extra information, but…
People are freaking out about BPA in the products they buy, but did you know some receipts which printed on called thermal paper are coated with a powder of BPA? And the BPA goes into your body through your fingers when you touch it! Those individual receipts can contain BPA that is 250 to 1,000 times greater than the amount in a can of food. And shockingly, hand sanitizers could increase the absorption of BPA into the body by up to100X! Imagine, you order french fries and grab the receipt, and use hand sanitizer and eat the fries. You are taking BPA not just from your skin, but also from the mouth! And perhaps even drinking water from a BPA-free plastic bottle, too.