Politics of plastic and public health: The struggle to define bisphenol A

In 1976, plastics production surpassed steel, and the age of plastics began. Petroleum-based plastics re-made everything from cars to ketchup bottles. This dramatic change in the material landscape introduced thousands of new chemicals into the environment, marketplace and ultimately our bodies. Among the thousands of new chemicals used in plastics, one in particular tells a critical history of the politics of plastics and public health—bisphenol A. Used in the production of plastics since the late 1940s, bisphenol A became a component of a growing number of consumer and industrial products including the lining of food cans, baby bottles, water main filters and reinforced piping. Domestic production of bisphenol A in the last three decades of the twentieth century increased more than tenfold, reaching 2.4 billion pounds by 2000. This paper traces the history of the debates about bisphenol A safety and toxicity as a means for understanding the intersecting histories of plastic production, chemical regulation, and scientific knowledge production and expertise from the late 1970s to the present. Widespread exposure to bisphenol A among workers and the general public drew the attention of federal research institutions in the late 1970s including the newly established National Toxicology Program. Equivocal findings, budgetary cuts and efforts to minimize regulatory costs stalled further investigation, and effectively sustained the legal safety of the chemical for the next decade. By the early 1990s, bisphenol A emerged at the center of a contentious scientific and political debate challenging the safety of estrogenic chemicals, and more broadly, chemical regulation and the science of toxicology. Although bisphenol A's estrogenic activity was first identified in the mid 1930s, this understanding re-surfaced in the early 1990s, when the chemical leached from plastic laboratory equipment and contaminated studies in cell biology and endocrinology. Working with minute exposures, similar to those found in humans, researchers in fields outside of toxicology began investigating bisphenol A from its interaction with the cell up through higher levels of complexity to include the developing organism. A growing number of researchers presented a spectrum of exposure effects including mammary gland carcinomas, chromosomal abnormalities, advanced puberty, decrease sperm production and increase weight gain, that collectively proposed new explanations of disease development and toxicity. Such transformations in the meaning of toxicity and disease challenged models of regulatory decision-making and risk assessment developed in the late 1970s and early 1980s.