The High-volume Hormonally Active Chemical Bisphenol A: Human Exposure, Health Hazards and Need to Find Alternatives

SOURCES AND ROUTES OF EXPOSURE AND METABOLIC FATE The chemical bisphenol A (BPA) was first used as a component of Bakelite, a plastic from which billiard balls and some other products were made in the early to mid 20th century. Similar to many phenolic compounds, BPA was reported to be a synthetic estrogen in 1936, and BPA had the efficacy of estradiol (Dodds and Lawson 1936). In the 1950s polymer chemists discovered that these estrogenic BPA molecules could be polymerized to make polycarbonate, a hard, clear plastic. BPA is also used in the manufacture of the resin lining of food and beverage cans in the USA and many other countries. In addition to being the monomer that is used in the above products, BPA is also used as an additive (plasticizer) in other types of plastic, such as polyvinyl chloride (PVC). BPA is one of the highest production volume chemicals in commerce, with over 8-billion pounds produced in 2008 (Bailin et al. 2008). The range of products that contain BPA is not known due to product confidentiality laws that protect corporations from revealing the chemicals used in products. A question that is often asked is: How could chemists have used a chemical that had been reported to act like a sex hormone to make plastic products such as baby bottles? The “green chemistry” movement not only provides answers to this question (which is that they did not pay attention to biological effects), but most importantly, it provides solutions (Anastas and Kirchhoff 2002).