Europe's regulators have confirmed that there is no risk to consumers from bisphenol A (BPA)-based food contact materials, such as polycarbonate and epoxy resins.
In January 2007 the European Food Safety Authority (EFSA) issued their opinion on the safety of BPA in consumer food contact applications. EFSA is an independent scientific panel that advises the European Commission on Food Safety matters.
After a review of some 200 studies and surveys on BPA that had appeared since 2002, EFSA decided that the results of a comprehensive multigenerational study on rats should be used to determine the safety level. Using the No Observed Adverse Effect level of 5 mg/kg and applying a uncertainty factor of 100 (for interspecies and inter-individual differences) the Tolerable Daily Intake (TDI) was determined to be 0.05 mg BPA/kg bodyweight/day, which is the amount of BPA a consumer (including babies and infants) can safely ingest without harm over a whole lifetime.
Typical BPA migration levels from BPA based food contact materials are < 10 microgram/kg food and thus well below the regulatory specific migration level for BPA of 600 microgram/kg food (based on the TDI, assuming a person of 60 kg eating 1kg of food per day, with an additional safety factor of 5). Using conservative migration levels, EFSA concluded in their 2007 opinion that the dietary exposure to BPA from polycarbonate plastic bottles and epoxy resin-coated food and drink cans is well below the TDI.
The updated risk assessment of June 2008 as well as the updated opinion of the European Food Safety Authority (EFSA) of July 2008, state clearly that food contact materials such as polycarbonate plastic baby bottles and drinking bottles and epoxy resin-coated food and drink cans are safe for their intended uses.
At a national level, the EFSA opinion has been confirmed in November 2008 by individual scientific opinions from the French Food Safety Agency (AFSSA) and the Dutch Food and Consumer Product Safety Authority (VWA). Moreover, the German BfR also confirmed the results of EFSA in its opinion released in September 2008.
In its opinion, EFSA examined the safety of BPA-based food contact applications for all age groups including foetuses and newborns. EFSA explicitly took into account recent kinetic or metabolism data as well as reviews by other authorities, such as the U.S. National Toxicology Program (NTP), Health Canada, the EU Commission's Joint Research Centre and the Norwegian Scientific Committee for Food Safety, as well as existing and very recent studies on this topic.
At the end of September 2010, EFSA published an updated opinion where it re-confirmed the existing safe intake level for BPA. The opinion followed an eleven month review of the most recent scientific literature and studies about exposure to BPA, even at low doses, as well as safety assessments of national food safety agencies, such as the ones from Denmark and France issued earlier in 2010. EFSA concluded that it could not identify any new evidence which would lead it to revise the current limits. The Authority also stated that the data currently available did not provide convincing evidence that BPA affects the nervous system.
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