BPA industry fights back with tobacco-inspired propaganda

A four-month investigation by the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel’s watchdog reporters has found that the chemical and plastics industries are undertaking a massive million-dollar public relations campaign to distort information about the safety of the toxic chemical bisphenol A (BPA).

The newspaper found that the industries are employing the same tactics and lobbyists that defended the tobacco industry in the 1990s. The industries are spending big bucks to defend the $6 billion BPA business. The Society of the Plastics Industry, for example, has launched a $10 million public relations campaign to extol the virtues of plastics to the demographic that will be spending the most on baby products in the near future – 18- to 28-year-olds.

While the tactics are the same, like distorting the findings of scientific studies, the approach to getting the information to the public are very different, according to the report:

New public relations materials show how the chemical industry is getting more aggressive about protecting its image as worries about chemicals in plastics mount - often in new and subtle ways.

Chemical makers and plastics industry executives are putting up their own versions of news clips on social media outlets such as YouTube, MySpace, Wikipedia, Twitter and blogs. Often, they are disguised as neutral, unbiased information and rarely reveal the source.

So what might look to consumers researching BPA on the Internet as independent information are often stories written by chemical industry public relations writers.

Another method the chemical industry is using is manipulating Web searches by putting paid links at the top of results for Web surfers looking for information about the safety of BPA and plastic products. If a Web surfer types Safer Chemicals Healthy Families - an organization working to get stricter federal regulations on toxic chemicals like BPA - into Google, the first result is a paid link from the American Chemistry Council.

The Journal Sentinel reports that not only is the BPA industry spending big to defend BPA, they are willfully manipulating scientific findings to suit their message:

For instance, the industry's Web site - www.bisphenol-a.org - claims that "potential human exposure to BPA from polycarbonate plastic and epoxy resin food contact applications is minimal and poses no known risk to human health." That statement is based on a 1983 assessment.

The Web site, which is not labeled as being owned and operated by the chemical lobby group, makes no mention of hundreds of studies conducted since 1983 that linked the chemical to harm. In 2007, the Journal Sentinel reviewed 258 scientific studies of BPA and found that the overwhelming majority determined the chemical is harmful.

Why has the BPA industry suddenly dramatically stepped up its defense of this toxic chemical, which has been linked to public health epidemics like diabetes, heart disease and obesity? Just like the cigarette industry, they can see the writing on the wall that federal regulation is coming and are doing everything they can to fight it.