Pick your (bisphenol A) battles
Feb 3rd, 2008 by keegan
Hubby came home the other day, dropped his backpack on the floor, walked over to the cabinet, pulled out our Nalgene bottles, and threw them all away. His school, Tufts University Medical School, just released a study showing that bisphenol A, a chemical that Nalgene uses in its bottles, causes all sorts of childhood behavioral problems, cancers, and fertility problems. Yikes! We have been nursing Nalgene bottles since we were 19 years old! And our children each had their own Nalgene bottle. So that explains those aisle 4 meltdowns in the grocery store…
Bisphenol A is not just used in Nalgene bottles, but also in canned foods, BABY BOTTLES! and disposable water bottles. Look out for the #7 on the bottom! And what else, I wonder? And if the evil Bisphenol A isn’t leeching into my water, are there other chemicals that are equally or more toxic that we’re ingesting? When I look around our kitchen, I see a plastic Brita filter, plastic milk jugs, plastic sippy cups, freezer filled with plastic ziplocks holding leftovers, ice cube trays, all my canned crushed tomatoes, and oh….. plastic bagged everything from cereal to crackers to my broccoli that is sitting in it’s plastic produce bag in the fridge. God help me if I find out that plastic is evil, because I don’t know how to live without it.
Here’s another creepy bit about plastic: when manufacturers are making plastic products, including our children’s toys, they make one version for the E.U., which has much stricter environmental and health standards than ours, and another version, complete with evil, leeching toxins for us. Isn’t that nice.
So, what to do? Call your congressperson and ask them to advocate for stronger standards, start petitions, and if you have the time and energy, please do it for me, too.
As for me for now, I’ll start at home by tossing all my sippy cups and tupperware that were years old (the longer the plastic is used- and especially if it is dishwasher-washed (God, help me!), the more probable chemical leeching is. Nice.) , and buying Pyrex glass storage containers. I’m not sure how this is going to work out with my 1 year old tearing through the cabinets and literally smashing everything he finds onto the floor. Isn’t Pyrex supposed to be unbreakable? Unbreakable glass… hmm.
I know that researching environmental evils can be a scary downward spiral which is hard to break out of. I’ve been there before, in college, when I first realized that every article of clothing I wore was made by some child laborer in a windowless factory, and that destroying CDs releases toxic chemicals into the ozone. I eventually got so overwhelmed, along with everyone who had to listen to me, that I let go. I now shop at BabyGap and Target, I throw old CDs out, and I don’t even have a compost in my back yard.
I think it is, like everything else in life, a balancing act. How do we live consciously and responsibly without losing our minds?
Here’s another person, mother, and friend of mine who has more good insight into this topic: Product of Compression
