Breaking Up With BPA: For Smaller Companies, Even A Little Is Way Too Much

Blogger Profiles

Blog

Monday, May 05, 2008
Posted by Jeremiah McNichols-Guest Blogger

Lansinoh, a manufacturer of electric and manual breast pumps and pure lanolin nipple cream, and Boon, the young design house behind a stylish young line of baby feeding products, might seem like very different companies, and in many ways they are. But thanks to increasing consumer awareness about the potential dangers of bisphenol-A, they have found themselves coming perilously close to a common fate.

Each company already had predominantly BPA-free products, but included the use of some polycarbonate plastic parts for largely aesthetic reasons, and both now sees the elimination of BPA from its product line as an urgent necessity. The changes are small, but costly; they represent thousands of units that will probably go unsold, their prospects growing dimmer by the day as a proposed ban on BPA in all children's products begins working its way through Congress. For Lansinoh, it is a pair of polycarbonate breast flanges for its electric pump; for Boon, the front end of a baby spoon.

It can be hard to appreciate why this issue has unfolded in the manner it has - why such opposition to reform held sway for so long, and why now, conversely and absurdly, so much waste and tumult must suddenly occur in order to ensure that we are limiting our children's exposure to endocrine-disrupting chemicals. But while researchers and activists have rightly focused on baby bottles as a key source of bisphenol-A exposure, understanding how we arrived at this point demands that we excavate from this cultural landfill not only the baby bottles that have made headlines but products like these, which have their own version of this story to tell.

Although polycarbonate earned renown in the plastics industry for its durability and heat-resistance, its key attraction for companies in the infant care industry is its clarity. Parents are anxious about getting bottles clean enough, and manufacturers have spent twenty years fetishizing this concern, so much so that key brands have become lifestyle brands precisely because of their intense association with this questionable plastic. This also explains a great deal about how difficult it has been for some companies to give up BPA despite mounting evidence of its dangers. At the same time, valve technologies have advanced considerably, meaning more small parts requiring careful cleaning, which in turn reinforces the relevance of polycarbonate. The result is that one of the most expensive of the common plastics was included in the design for many products that did not require, from a technical standpoint, extreme durability or heat-resistance. The "requirement" was clarity, which is as essential to a baby bottle as a white coat is to a doctor, which is to say, not at all. It invokes a feeling which can be a powerful tonic in challenging times, and top bottle-makers have been taking this feeling to the bank.

The visual power of polycarbonate plastic - the semiotics that governed both its marketing and its use among young parents - are the only way to understand the migration of polycarbonate into breast pump design. At the same time that bottle-makers were praising polycarbonate as the safest plastic for bottles because of its "shatterproof" strength (despite the absence of reports of children crushing polypropylene bottles, or glass ones, for that matter) virtually all of the major U.S. breast pump manufacturers, including Lansinoh, Ameda, Playtex, Evenflo, and Avent, selected polycarbonate plastic for the flanges of some or all of their breast pumps, products used by a mother in the absence of any infant. Some bottle companies treated breast pumps as brand extensions, but the symbol was so ingrained, even those with more economical bottles fell under its sway. Only Medela stayed with the far more inert polypropylene, putting it in a tremendously powerful position with regard to BPA-free products today.

Manufacturing and distributing products destined for major retail chains, as Boon does, exposes a strategic weakness when it comes to responding to evolving market conditions. Each of these two stages takes several months, and companies must be able to anticipate trends or ride them out coolly in order to stay afloat. From this purely practical perspective, the contested potential dangers of a chemical are, rightly or wrongly, one business decision among the many that will be made in preparing to launch a new product.

When Boon's designers came up with an idea for a spoon with a chamber that could be squeezed to release "bites" of baby food, their knowledge and background suggested polycarbonate as the most attractive choice for a product that would have a concave interior surface and hole through which pureed food passed. Parents will want to know they can get that thing clean, they figured. This was not that long ago, but it has the stretched-out timeline common to such products that makes product development for a large scale so insular: The company launched its feeding line in the fall of 2007, which means it probably entered production much earlier in that year, and was being designed in early 2007 or even late 2006.

Fortunately for Boon (or wisely, depending on your perspective) they have a full line of other plastic feeding products which do not contain polycarbonate. They have good connections, good distribution, and in the online world of photographic sound bytes, their upended product ideas - a toddler snack container that doubles as a ball, a bowl with a spill-guard - practically sell themselves.

Others have not been so lucky. Startup Playware Products, which launched with a polycarbonate divided food tray mere weeks ago, found sales of its initial run of 10,000 units competing for press coverage with news reports suddenly cautioning against the very plastic they'd selected for their product. When the National Toxicology Program released their assessment, the company quickly withdrew the product from the market, tucked their PR campaign back under their arm, and more or less went home, even asking those who had reviewed the product to take their largely positive reviews down. Whether such a small startup will be able to recover financially and relaunch that or any other product is anyone's guess.

Allowing U.S. infant care companies to quietly phase out BPA not only without product recalls but while continuing to sell polycarbonate products throughout the process of transition might seem to be letting them off the hook. Companies are quickly announcing release dates for BPA-free products they have been quietly developing for months, and are denying plans to discontinue polycarbonate products they've probably already written off as a loss. But the fate of any BPA legislation landing on the desk of an end-of-term president who dislikes regulation, distrusts scientists and the media, faces a deepening recession, and has strong ties to the petrochemical industry, remains to be seen. For now, we're considering it a victory that both Boon and Lansinoh intend to begin labeling their products as BPA-free, which means that when the safer Squirt and Lansinoh electric pumps reach stores, consumers will be able to identify them as the relaunched products that they are. In an environment in which parents are increasingly forced to live by their wits, it's something.