Print Friendly and PDF
Science: Pay attention to two other messages in the breakthrough BPA water treatment paper.
Stephan Arnold/Unsplash

Science: Pay attention to two other messages in the breakthrough BPA water treatment paper.

It's plausible no living multi-cellular organism on this planet is BPA-free. And the levels we're living with could be causing harm.

2 min read

Science: Pay attention to two other messages in the breakthrough BPA water treatment paper


Stephen Arnold

It's plausible no living multi-cellular organism on this planet is BPA-free. And the levels we're living with could be causing harm.

Aug. 8, 2017

By Pete Myers

Environmental Health News

Follow @petemyers

I want to call your attention to some important details in the latest research from Terry Collins' green chemistry laboratory at Carnegie Mellon University. We covered the main story last week: There now exists economically viable, efficient technology to remove BPA and a host of similar chemicals from water.

But the paper has two additional sections that make it even more important.  Collins's team wrote two mini-reviews to help chemists—the primary readers of the journal Green Chemistry, where the paper was published—understand what’s the big deal.  The water-treatment breakthrough is the meat, so to speak, between two pieces of bread.  But that bread—the two reviews—has profound implications.  Given how siloed science is, it was not safe to expect that chemists not specializing in endocrine disruption would immediately grasp this. Collins and his team lay it out in stark terms.

A dose of BPA one half of the level that EPA considers safe—and that is easily within the range of everyday exposure—caused many adverse effects.

The first review assesses the environmental occurrence of BPA.  It is stunningly ubiquitous, at a scale even I didn’t appreciate.  Collins thinks it’s plausible that no living multi-cellular organism on this planet is without BPA contamination.

The second mini-review examines the evidence on low dose toxicity of BPA.   I knew most of that material. For those who haven’t thought much about this or followed the ins and outs of the emerging evidence, it, too, is stunning:  For example, in 2013 University of Missouri's Brittany Angle and others published results showing that multiple aspects of metabolism are disrupted in adult mice following exposure to their mother while they were in the womb. High doses of BPA did not cause an effect, but a dose of BPA that is one half of the level that EPA considers safe—and that is easily within the range to which many people are regularly exposed—did cause many adverse effects.  

Thus, as often happens with BPA and other endocrine disruptors, most of the outcomes showed "inverted-U" dose response curves, meaning that they would not have been detected by standard regulatory testing.

Together, the two reviews make the case that this is a global problem, probably not just for individual organisms affected but also, by implication, for ecosystem function. Given that BPA is an "environmental estrogen," it could be contributing to the global decline in sperm count, among other things—something we're already seeing, as I reported last month.(4)

Pete Myers is the founder and chief scientist of Environmental Health Sciences, nonprofit publisher of EHN.org and DailyClimate.org.

EHN welcomes republication of our stories, but we require that publications include the author's name and Environmental Health News at the top of the piece, along with a link back to EHN's version.

For questions or feedback about this piece, contact Brian Bienkowski at bbienkowski@ehn.org.

About the author(s):

Pete Myers

Pete Myers is the founder and chief scientist of Environmental Health Sciences, publisher of EHN.org and DailyClimate.org

Become a donor
Today's top news
From our newsroom

Heat, air pollution and climate change … oh my! Was summer 2023 the new normal?

Intense heat waves induced by climate change create favorable conditions for air pollution to worsen. Scientists say this isn’t likely to change unless action is taken.

Calor, aire contaminado y cambio climático…¿Es el verano de 2023 nuestro futuro?

Intensas olas de calor provocadas por el cambio climático, crearon condiciones que empeoraron la contaminación del aire. Los científicos dicen que nada cambiará sin intervenciones.

Opinion: Protecting Indigenous children means protecting water

We need to stop compartmentalizing the environment, family and culture as separate problems.

Tracking down a poison: Getting the lead out of spices in Bangladesh and Georgia

Many low- and middle-income countries lack the resources to tackle lead poisoning. Here’s how two countries did it.