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JEREMIAH MCNICHOLS:  At ZRecs we have always maintained - both to concerned consumers and to companies making unsubstantiated claims about the safety of their products - that our goal as consumers and as a society should be to reduce our overall exposure levels to many chemicals, knowing that we will never completely eliminate them, at least not within our lifetimes.

The production, use, and waste cycle of these products ensures that chemicals like these are present not only in a huge array of products, but in our environment as well. It is quite likely, for example, that there is some (very small) amount of BPA in your tap water.  Another example, and one most people aren't yet aware of, is paper products, specifically, toilet paper.

As it turns out the source of BPA in toilet paper appears not to be that it is added deliberately to the product, but that a lot of toilet paper is made from post-consumer sources that include lots of recycled thermal printing paper (credit card receipts). Dresden University did a study examining BPA turning up in wastewater streams and traced it back to toilet paper as the culprit. We first learned about this study here and here.

Environmental regulators consider sources like this disconcerting because endocrine-disrupting chemicals like BPA and phthalates can wreak havoc on marine ecosystems. Ultimately, it's sources like these that are the reason you probably have BPA (at extremely low concentrations) in your tap water, too.

The same thing goes for other kinds of recycled paper, too. When we add up all of the sources we now know of, BPA can be found at smaller levels, and less clear exposure levels, than the children's products we have been talking about for some time. These products include:

* Credit card receipts

* Recycled cardboard pizza boxes and paper

* Beer and wine (vats are lined with a BPA-containing resin)

* Rubbermaid polycarbonate-lined baking tins used by Subway

* Soda cans and food cans

* Baby food jars (lids) and formula packaging (metal cans, glass jar lids, and paper packaging foil seals)

* Many non-polycarbonate plastics (including the color-changing plastics used by Sassy and others), in addition to PC

Consumer advocates and reporters like us often avoid raising topics like this for a few, closely-related reasons:

1. Consumers often have difficulty managing their feelings about a given chemical, and think in terms of eliminating individual ones rather than chipping away at the overall chemical load of known harmful substances.

2. We believe not all sources are created equal. BPA is found in many of these products at extremely low levels. Most of these also expose us to BPA in far less obvious ways, if at all, and more research is needed on the dose/effect relationship of different levels of BPA and other endocrine disruptors.

3. We don't want people to feel powerless, or like the changes they make don't make a difference, because, to the best of our understanding of an emerging area of scientific scrutiny, they do make a big difference.

That said, we consider toilet paper to be a specific source of concern, for reasons a polite blogger should probably avoid getting into. Suffice to say that exposure is certain and frequent.

I don't believe there is currently enough scientific data to warrant fears about melamine tableware, or about chemicals leaching from #1, #2, and #5 plastics. A few isolated studies and alerts have come out on each of these but we believe a lot more rigorous data collection is needed before calling for any changes to regulation or to consumer habits. We may post more specifically about this if there is interest, or wait until we see more data and do so then.

I also discussed how our ability to test for these chemicals at lower and lower levels is steadily advancing, and that the scientific and regulatory community is going to face some challenging questions regarding what constitute acceptable levels of different chemicals. We'll write about that again in a future post.

The opinions expressed here are solely those of the author and not necessarily those of Healthy Child Healthy World.

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