BPA Paper Tigers: “Check The Receipts”

October 22nd, 2009. By Hunter West

As LawyersandSettlements revealed today there is a new and disturbing source of bisphenol-A (BPA). 

Move over, plastic water bottles. Enter the cash register and credit card receipt. Something we handle every day, keep in our wallets, pile on top of our desks…. 

According to John C. Warner, of the Warner Babcock Institute of Green Chemistry in Wilmington, Massachusetts BPA contained in electronic cash register and credit card receipts has been a problem for some time. 

It was about ten years ago when BPA first appeared on the radar screen, a time when Babcock was teaching green chemistry at the University of Massachusetts. His former career with Polaroid taught him a thing or two about thermal imagining papers, a subject he talked about in an interview with ScienceNews published on October 7^th. 

Manufacturers would coat a powdery layer of BPA onto one side of a piece of paper together with an invisible ink, he said. “Later, when you applied pressure or heat, they would merge together and you’d get color.” 

At the time, in the ’90s he thought little about the technology, he told ScienceNews, other than the fact he thought it was clever. However, when the health concerns about BPA began to emerge, he looked into it further—and he was in a perfect position to do so. As a professor of green chemistry at the University of Massachusetts, he had a ready gang of assistants—his students—who fanned out into the community and collected as many cash and credit card receipts as they could find. 

They then dissolved the paper in the lab, ran everything through a mass spectrometer and looked for a telltale spike in the readout that signaled the presence of BPA. 

They found it. Not in all the papers, mind you but in plenty. And levels were pretty high when compared to the levels found in some plastic bottles and lined aluminum water bottles. 

Not all cash register receipts and credit card receipts contained BPA. But some did. And the ones that did, and the ones that didn’t, look the same. You can’t tell from the naked eye which receipt is dangerous and which isn’t. 

Warner is an inventor at heart and possesses a number of patents. Now directing his energies to the Warner Babcock Institute for Green Chemistry, which he co-founded in Wilmington, MA Warner would like to see the development of a device that serves as a new analog to the old litmus test: a device, or entity that one could pass over a receipt, or even the fingers to detect the presence of BPA. If the latter were found, it would change color. 

ScienceNews reminds us of the research that showed bisphenol-A, an estrogen-mimicking chemical, could disrupt the normal development of a rodent’s gonads—or evoke changes that predisposed animals to later develop cancer. 

In other words, BPA is bad stuff. Over the past year or so there has been a wholesale movement to ban plastic water bottles and baby bottles containing BPA, and the recent trials and tribulations experienced by SIGG and Gaiam over their aluminum water bottles and the potential for the leaching of BPA from the inner lining has caught everyone’s attention. It should be noted that the bottles are not considered dangerous when used as directed in normal operating conditions and were manufactured according to current regulatory parameters. It was only when the bottles were super-heated to 200 degrees Fahrenheit over a period of three days that trace amounts of BPA leached out. 

However, cash register receipts and credit card receipts—those that contain BPA—need no such super-heated stressing to leach. It’s available to the touch, at levels far greater than plastic water bottles, says Warner. 

And while most people are not into ingesting paper receipts (unless you’re desperate and you don’t want the wife to find out about the questionable purchase you made), Warner reminds that you don’t have to ingest something to be affected by it. Look at the transdermal patch that is used for the application and delivery of pain medication and the hormones inherent with some birth control formulations through the skin. 

BPA is no different, Warner says. 

This reveals a huge potential source for BPA contamination. Receipts are routinely handled, stored and re-handled. How many times have you shifted the piles of receipts around on your desk, or the dining room table? And at tax time, you handle those receipts yet again. Accountants and tax preparers make a career out of it. 

Warner has yet to publish his findings and has no intention of doing so, given the rigors of the publishing process. His mandate with the Warner Babcock Institute for Green Chemistry is not to expose nasties that could harm us, but rather to find ways to improve our current processes to make our world a greener and safer place. 

We’ll let John Warner work away at doing just that. In the meantime organizations and entities with a mandate for testing, analyzing and reporting should take up this cause and conclusively address the potential danger associated with bisphenol-A in cash register and credit card receipts through an organized analysis with critical protocols and peer-reviewed conclusions. 

With any luck people like John Warner and his Warner Babcock Institute for Green Chemistry will come up with an alternative technology to the status quo—one that is greener, and delivers more safety. 

For the rest of us, we need to think twice about the receipts we are handling and how we handle them. For the legal community, this is an issue that could impact BPA litigation. Not everybody uses plastic, or lined re-usable aluminum water bottles. But pretty near everyone has made a purchase with cash or a credit card and has shifted that receipt from the bag…to the wallet…to the desk…to the file…and back to the desk over and over again. Even once, with BPA is enough. 

When there is a health issue linked to BPA, lawyers will no longer be looking for just the presence of water bottles. The mantra, instead, will be “check the receipts.” 

And at tax time—it might be an idea to use latex gloves.

Tags: BPA, BPA receipts

This was posted on Thursday, October 22nd, 2009 at 3:40 pm and is filed under Defective Products, Emerging Issues . Feel free to respond, or trackback. Read our comments policy.