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Plastic Chemical BPA Declared Toxic In Canada
Julie188 writes "The Canadian government has formally declared bisphenol A (BPA), a chemical widely used to create clear, hard plastics, as well as food can liners, to be a toxic substance. Does this mean that you'll be tackled by the Canadian Mounties if you stroll around with some bottled water? Not exactly. Being a toxic chemical doesn't mean you can't get a little love. The government will at first try and set limits on how much BPA can be released into the air or water by factories that use the compound."
So, our wonderful government declares BPA toxic, while at the same time continuing to deny asbestos's toxicity and exporting asbestos to the rest of the world.
It's all domestic politics. Banning asbestos would annoy Quebec, the major producer...
This is definitely a step in the right direction. BPA is a risk to the entire population and it's use is very widespread. It disrupts our hormonal system and has now been linked to different types of breast cancer, heart disease and endocrine disorders. It also affects our reproductive systems. People really need to be aware that the use of plastics containing BPA is harmful and that use of this substance is currently ubiquitous throughout the world.
Fine, Canada. We're going to declare Justin Bieber a toxic substance.
Your move.
I hope Brita comes out with a glass pitcher...
I'm pretty certain they'll come out with a BPA-free plastic version instead, since that's all the rage in bottles and food containers for infants.
Personally, I'd be happy to have a world free of BPA. Unfortunately, that's going to be very difficult as it's found in many common items. For some, there are plastics that are good alternatives, but others, it will be some time before alternates can be found. In particular, epoxy binders used wood-based sheet goods production (particle board, chip board, flooring, etc.) are bad and are going to be around for a long time since there is so much of it installed.
My family and I have stopped eating anything that comes in a can. Not only are cans typically lined with BPA-bearing plastics, but the contents are in intimate contact for a very long time. Avoiding canned foods has been pretty easy with one exception: canned tomatoes. If anyone has a good solution for those, I'd love to hear it.
Put my fist through my alarm clock with its ding-dong death inside my ear. - The Blackjacks.
Do not eat the bottle.
It has been known and banned in many other parts of the world. I don't even think the USA has done anything about it though. If you avoid number 3 plastics you have no BPA worries. That means number 1, 2, 4, 5, and six are BPA free. Just thought everyone would like to know
You'd have have a bigger reduction of BPA intake by making sure you wash your hand every time you handle a thermal printed receipt.
or was it just misheard, maybe they wanted to ban BP Eh
Oddly enough Thermal Receipts have the most BPA. Something like a 1000 x as much as you would get from a water bottle.
If you get a receipt and then eat your burger is the receipt a food product regulated in the same way you might regulate a plastic fork?
In Canada regulation will all depend on if the receipt paper is made in Quebec or near Ottawa.
I bring in empty bottles of bottled water so that I can fill them at the fountain once I'm in. That way I have the convenience of bottled water without having to pay for one at airport pricing. I've never had a problem with that. So there's nothing that would prevent someone from taking in their empty bottle or buying it in the airport and taking it to Canada that way.
Learn to love Alaska
One other major use of BPA you may not know about is as a coating on sales slips. BPA is easily absorbed from these coatings just by handling them without gloves. For shoppers, the exposure is not much, but for someone working a cash register all day, it's a problem.
The sickest part of all this is that we guessed BPA could be trouble as far back as the 1930s! It's frightening how special interests have managed to keep these rather important safety questions from being answered for almost 80 years. BPA could be one of the reasons for the current obesity and diabetes epidemic.
Today, we're still being just as foolish. "Doubt is our product". One wonders if we're doomed when you look around and see that far from Big Tobacco's program to sow doubt and confusion having become the canonical example of unethical, immoral, and stupid behavior, it is actually rather admired and emulated! The Climate Change deniers look to Big Tobacco's efforts for inspiration. Lately, those finance guys who needed a huge bailout from the public have been trotting out the same sort of excuses about how no one could have known. They're supposed to be the savvy sophisticated experts, but never mind that. They did know, and everyone knows it. Their claims that they couldn't know are pathetic. Yet so far, they are being allowed to get away with it, and that is in no small part because of the constant war being waged upon facts and science. And the constant diversion of our attention to other matters such as war and piracy. If I understand the bargain made with Mozilo, he will not see any jail time, and I fear he was let off way too easily.
I don't know what reforms we can make to change all this. Shine more "light of day" on everything? But we have a huge amount of deliberately created confusion over just what is right and wrong, and what wrongs are important and what aren't. Potheads do time while so-called white collar crooks walk free. Baseball players get grilled by Congress for steroid use while big corporations slide by for much worse things, or even get a few apologies as BP did! Perhaps the problem is that too many students pass through our education system failing to really get science, so that they are easily befuddled by nonsense? Or are too sheltered and come out naive and ripe for fleecing and hustling? Or are spoiled and careless, easily diverted with bread and circuses? Or have been corrupted and made cynical, and think that there isn't an honest person in the whole world, so they might as well also cheat and steal as much as possible? Why do so many people endure the shady treatment they get from telecoms companies, for one? A huge task to begin straightening that out while calling out the perps for the liars, thieves, and murderers that they are. Throwing them into jail would be a start. And take away all their ill gotten gains. ALL of it. We also desperately need to regain control of executive pay, which has risen so high that the difference between what each executive is paid and what the President of the US is paid is enough to have bailed out the economy several times over. But all that is not enough. We don't want people cynically feeling that these hucksters were cool and smooth, admiring them for being "successful", and worst of all thinking that they were righteous.
Intellectual Property is a monopolistic, selfish, and defective concept. It is "tyranny over the mind of man"
and you will find their sewage ducts, waterways, roadsides, well...everywhere actually choked with BPA plastic bags and food containers. Standard practice is to just burn the stuff, but it usually causes localized flooding disease first. Oh yea, the ocean is full of the stuff too. Aren't we humans a wonderful species?
but the vast oceans of residue from tar sands mining has now been proven both nutritious and delicious, eh!
Cryonics - Keep cool and carry on.
but outsiders so seldom win office (the most recent one I can think of is Ventura in Minnesota), that I feel it's usually better to try for the lesser of the 2 evils than throw my vote away on a futile protest.
This is exactly the mentality that prevents outsiders from ever winning office. If you vote for evil, then you will surely get evil.
While I think it's ridiculous when CEOs are giving hundreds of millions in bonuses or salaries, those are privately-owned companies, and they're free to (over)pay as much as they want to.
Yes. And then their overpaid executards buy off Congress, loot their companies and run them into the ground, wreck the economy and demand trillion dollar bailouts funded by people who actually do productive work.
So no, letting a bunch of obvious crooks and psychopaths steal all they want doesn't actually work in practice. This should hardly come as a great surprise.
This action is favored by the Democrats and the Republicans: remember, TARP was done by a Democrat-controlled Congress under Bush, and then the GM/Chrysler bailout was done by Obama and friends.
The Senate approved the bailout measure on Oct. 1, 2008, on a bipartisan vote of 74 to 25. The House initially rejected the proposal, but under prodding from the White House and leading members of both parties, House members ultimately voted 263 to 171 for the bill, with 91 Republicans joining 172 Democrats in backing it; 108 Republicans and 63 Democrats voted no.
And I actually don't have a problem with TARP per se - clearly the financial system had been wrecked by 30 years of idiotic laissez-faire policy - the problem I have with it is that the perpetrators of that collapse have all walked free (adding insult to injury, plenty of them have served in both the Bush and Obama administrations), and many of them are still running the same Wall Street firms that precipitated the collapse.
At least with the GM/Chrysler bailout, the executives who ran those companies into the ground were also forced out. Those bailouts also cost a tiny fraction of what we've spent so far bailing out Wall Street (not to mention the multi-trillion dollar impact the collapse of Wall Street's gambling spree has had on the economy as a whole).