Not long ago, environmental and health advocates pushed for the removal of a ubiquitous plasticizer, bisphenol-A, or BPA, from consumer products amid concerns about adverse health effects. Many in industry scrambled for a replacement and turned to bisphenol-S, or BPS, which quietly began to fill in for BPA. Others not so quietly dug in their heels, downplaying the concerns.
We all remember Gov. Paul LePage’s 2011 quip about some women growing “little beards” as the worst case scenario from exposure to BPA. Years later, with more evidence in hand regarding the adverse health effects of BPA, and with many in industry already bowing to the concerns of consumers, regulators began to institute compulsory bans on BPA from certain consumer products.
With fears that the federal Consumer Product Safety Improvement Act of 2008 left important gaps, the Maine state Legislature enacted the Toxic Chemicals in Children’s Products law (often referred to as the Maine Green Chemistry law) to require specific labeling on children’s products that contained “chemicals of high concern.”
While these measures are important to limit exposure to BPA and other “chemicals of high concern,” this is not the most effective way to tackle issues of exposure to toxic chemicals. Rather than leaving issues of toxicity to regulators alone, molecular designers should consider a reduction in toxicity as one of their primary design criteria, rather than a distant afterthought behind cost and function. Toxicity as an afterthought is no fault of the designers themselves, but rather a flaw in our training system. We chemists and chemical engineers rarely receive any formal training in toxicology; it is often not required even to receive an advanced degree.
Now that concerns over BPA have been largely accepted, and with new concerns mounting about BPS, we should have learned to worry less about how we remove individual chemicals from shelves and focus more on changing the way that all chemicals make it to the shelf in the first place. We charge regulatory agencies with the near-impossible task of determining health risks of the 500-1,000 new chemicals that hit the market every year, not to mention, cataloging and updating information for the more than 80,000 chemicals already under manufacture.
We use these new chemicals to make advanced materials to keep up with our ever-evolving needs. These needs include waterproof materials for raincoats, solar panel components, computer parts and plasticizers (like BPA and BPS) for reducing the brittleness of water bottles. The story of plasticizers in water bottles, can linings and receipt paper should teach us the problems of bringing new materials to market in a system where industry considers function and cost, but where the onus of considering toxicity is left to regulators.
Instead, we should encourage a system in which chemists receive training in toxicology and incorporate a reduction in toxicity as part of their design criteria, rather than passing the task on to regulators. Until such a system is in place, similar scenarios like the BPA/BPS saga will continue to play out.
If our priorities and considerations lay first with the development of inherently safer chemicals, then with function and cost, fewer toxic chemicals will make it to the market in the first place.
Seth Butler is a junior at Colby College in Waterville pursuing majors in biology-neuroscience and psychology with a minor in chemistry.Reuben Hudson is a postdoctoral fellow in chemistry at Colby College.