By MARTIN MITTELSTAEDT, ENVIRONMENT REPORTER
Published on Thursday, Apr. 01, 2010 4:30PM EDT Japanese scientists testing ocean water and sea sand have found widespread contamination with high levels bisphenol A, a chemical used to make plastic that’s able to mimic the female hormone estrogen in living things. Its presence in sea water comes from the breakdown of the plastic trash being dumped into the sea and from the use of the compound in anti-rusting paints applied to the hulls of ships. BPA is man-made and does not occur naturally in the environment. The researchers took samples at more than 200 sites, mainly on the coasts around North America and Southeast Asia. They detected the chemical along the shorelines of 20 countries and in every batch of water or sand tested. … The research results were presented last week in San Francisco at a meeting of the American Chemical Society, and one of the scientists who conducted the sampling says it shows there is widespread decomposition in the environment of the hard type of plastic, known as polycarbonate, made from BPA. Products ranging from lenses on eyeglasses to big, office-style water jugs are made from polycarbonate. “We were quite surprised to find that polycarbonate plastic biodegrades in the environment,” said one of the researchers, Katsuhiko Saido, a chemist at Nihon University in Japan. He thought another big source was from a resin, known as epoxy and made partly from BPA, that is commonly applied onto ship hulls to prevent them from rusting out or becoming covered with barnacles. “This new finding clearly demonstrates the instability of epoxy and shows that BPA emissions from epoxy do [contaminate] the ocean,” Dr. Saido said. … Because BPA is able to stick to substances, the highest levels detected were in sand, at a staggering 28,000 times Environment Canada’s proposed limit for water. “What’s really astonishing here is the amounts,” said Frederick vom Saal, a biologist at the University of Missouri, who did not participate in the research. Dr. vom Saal, a major authority on hormones, is worried that people going to the beach could be exposed to BPA and either absorb it through their skin while swimming or from sand. He said it was “a scary finding that the levels in the ocean could already be at levels where you would not want to swim … This is shocking.” …
BPA widespread in ocean water and sand via Apocadocs
