Holy S#@T: There’s BPA in my Recycled Toilet Paper

It seems the bad news about BPA never ceases!  From canned foods to pacifiers, this hormone disrupting chemical has been a cause for concern ignored by the FDA.

Today, I was shocked to read on Z Recommends that there is BPA in our wastewater and tap water!  The source of this BPA contamination is recycled toilet paper.

Jeremiah at Z Recs, a BPA expert in my opinion, writes:

As it turns out (post-call research on my part) the source of BPA in toilet paper appears not to be that it is added deliberately to the product, but that a lot of toilet paper is made from post-consumer sources that include lots of recycled thermal printing paper (credit card receipts). Dresden University did a study examining BPA turning up in wastewater streams and traced it back to toilet paper as the culprit…Environmental regulators consider sources like this disconcerting because endocrine-disrupting chemicals like BPA and pthalates can wreak havoc on marine ecosystems. Ultimately, it’s sources like these that are the reason you probably have BPA (at extremely low concentrations) in your tap water, too.  The same thing goes for other kinds of recycled paper, too.

• » See also: The Joy of Green Cleaning by Leslie Reichert
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Dang, I thought I was doing a good thing for the environment wiping my bottom with recycled toilet paper.  Our world has been so invaded with chemicals that it is not surprising BPA would turn up in waste and tap water.  I am thankful my drinking water comes from a spring; however, the leach line in my septic system certainly must leak trace amounts of BPA from our recycled toilet paper into the soil.  I just don’t want to think about what how BPA may enter my children’s bodies by using toilet paper.  I guess it is time for a bidet.

Image: Est Bleu2007 on Flickr under a Creative Commons License

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