On January 27, 2022, a group of scientists and organizations in the public health and environmental sector submitted a formal food additive petition to the US Food and Drug Administration (FDA), asking the FDA to withdraw its current approvals for the use of bisphenol A (BPA, CAS 80-05-7) in adhesives and coatings, as well as to set limits for BPA in plastic food contact articles when migration into food may be above 0.5 ng/kg food.

The petition’s authors justify their request by citing recent scientific findings demonstrating that current public exposures to BPA are not safe according to the agency’s own definition. The new scientific findings are the result of the European Food Safety Authority’s (EFSA) re-evaluation of health risks from BPA. EFSA’s scientists’ findings indicate that the chemical can induce harmful effects at levels 100,000 times lower than previously thought. This outcome led EFSA to propose lowering the tolerable daily intake of the chemical to 0.04 ng/kg body weight/day.

The US petitioners are now requesting the FDA to review their BPA “food additive petition because the proposed amendments to the agency’s rule are intended to significantly increase the safety of the food supply.”

Heather Patisau, Endocrine Society BPA expert from North Carolina State University and one of the petitioners stated that the recent “findings are extremely concerning and prove the point that even very low levels of BPA exposure can be harmful and lead to issues with reproductive health, breast cancer risk, behavior, and metabolism.” Another petitioner, Dr. Maricel Maffini, researcher and independent consultant, and member of the Food Packaging Forum’s Scientific Advisory Board, commented that “these new findings should be a wakeup call to the FDA and all of us that our health is in jeopardy unless we take swift action to limit the amount of BPA that can come into contact with our food.”

In December 2021, the European Court of Justice confirmed the listing of BPA as a substance of very high concern (SVHC) under the EU’s REACH regulation due to its endocrine-disrupting properties for humans. Around the same time, the South American trade bloc Mercosur also passed updates to ban the use of BPA in food contact articles designed for children, and to lower BPA migration limits from other food contact articles to current levels permitted in Europe. But with the new EFSA proposal, migration limits for BPA in Europe would have to be reduced even further.