Never mind the quality, feel the width

I don't know whether bisphenol A is harmful or not. I do know that a lot of people think it is and they seemingly outnumber the people who think it isn't. Public health and safety is not the X Factor. Sheer weight of numbers should not be the arbiter. But right or wrong, I think it will be.

     The latest attack on polycarbonate baby bottles came today in the publication of a report, supporting a call for a ban, from Breast Cancer UK. It was followed smartly by a riposte from the British Plastics Federation. The Breast Cancer UK report assembles a lot of published research findings and knits them together with the results of a YouGov survey carried out on-line last week.

     The BPF's response to the campaign looks at first sight a little ineffectual. Its scientific rebuttal of some 75 references to research and scientific opinion is a restatement of the Food Standards Agency's view that, in essence, "we and our European colleagues set a threshold for BPA intake that isn't exceeded in normal practice, so the use of BPA is safe". And the BPF then goes on to criticise the research and split hairs about the wording. It says "Contrary to many of the press reports on the Breast Cancer UK campaign the use of BPA in baby bottles has not been banned or restricted by the Canadian government." Not, note, that Breast Cancer UK had said that BPA had been banned in Canada, but that press reports of the campaign had said that. In fact the report does acknowledge that restrictions have not yet been implemented – but it is quite clear that this is just procedural timing and that it is going to happen. The BPF does not mention what the report also quotes, that in some states in the USA legislation to ban polycarbonate bottles has been enacted and they are counting down to actual enforcement.

     I don't know how much notice the BPF had of the start of this campaign, but it does look as if it was caught slightly on the back foot in its response. It does have a position statement on its web site which includes a very recent statement on BPA safety by PlasticsEurope, but even this looks a little thin when compared to the mass of research thrown in by the anti-BPA brigade.

     And this, I think, is what will ultimately settle the safety question. Whether or not a ban on BPA in food contact products is justified, it will be pressed home by the combination of real research, loaded opinion polls asking questions like "To what extent do you agree or disagree that it is important that the UK Government acts in a precautionary way when it comes to protecting babies and very young children from BPA?" (is it any surprise that only 5 per cent of respondents said they disagreed?), a view that if in doubt ban it, the insinuation of commercial interest at work to maim children for profit, and the hysteria of a million American moms on the internet.

Education, education, innovation

The opening of the Borealis Innovation Centre in Linz, Austria, last week was an object lesson in joined up technology. The centre is not just a means of developing polyolefin products and applications. It is a propagator for seedcorn.

     All the moulding machines, pipe extrusion lines and film plants on which Borealis has lavished millions are nothing without the engineers to run them and to extrapolate from what they do. And the importance of creating the engineers was something the company rammed home over and over again at the centre's inauguration.

     Linz is in Upper Austria, an area rich in plastics processors and suppliers of equipment and materials which is rather unoriginally referred to as "plastics valley" – perhaps a misnomer for an area so substantially hilly. The government of Upper Austria has recognised that a plastics industry today isn't necessarily a plastics industry tomorrow. Industry doesn't stand still. As regional governor Josef Pühringer said at the inauguration: "When the future is on offer you have to react quickly or someone else will beat you to it". The threat from neighbouring Central European countries is all too clear; they have economics on their side and physical links to Western European markets are not so different from Austria's, so the way to stay ahead is to be better technologically.

     Upper Austria has expanded the polymer technology education at its local universities, with both its own funding and funding from plastics industry companies. And Borealis has added a catch-'em-young process of welcoming local school students in for a once-a-week session on polymer technology backed up by summer holiday courses.

     Local industry has aligned with local government to fund and manage local education to benefit, protect and expand local industry and local government. In this country we seem to be lacking a couple of critical masses – the international companies running research centres and local government with sufficient autonomy to recognise and pay for industry support on a need-to-do basis. Which makes what links there are between our universities, colleges and forward-looking companies all the more important.

Welsh get Carried Away with bag vendetta

According to a press release from the Welsh Assembly 97·3 per cent of litter in Wales is rubbish other than plastic bags, as is 97·9 per cent of litter found on beaches. That doesn't sound too bad, does it? Hardly a problem that needs draconian measures like taxing people for accepting a bag from a retailer.

     Of course, the Assembly didn't quite put it like that. It presented the figures the other way round to show that bags are 2·7 per cent of all litter and 2·1 per cent of litter found on beaches (still not a lot it seems, given the fuss being made). The aim was to support (justify?) its new "Get Carried Away" campaign for people to get used to carrying a reusable shopping bag ahead of its planned charge on single-use carrier bags coming in in 2011.

     I still can't get my head round the logic behind these anti-bag campaigns. The Welsh Assembly tells us: "Each year an estimated 320 million bags are handed out in Wales and it takes between 500 and 1,000 years for them to degrade." So what? This is only relevant if these bags are dropped in the street or sent straight to landfill. If, on the other hand, the people of Wales are responsible in their attitude to littering, and use their supermarket shoppers for other things for which they might otherwise buy additional bags, the problem perceived by the Welsh Assembly becomes a lot less pertinent. And if the Welsh Assembly put into place a practical means of collecting bags for recycling – with other mixed household plastics – then it would really be doing something useful.

     Personally, I like an occasional supermarket shopper blowing in the wind. Every day I walk a couple of miles to get a newspaper, and along the way I pick up the litter dropped in the otherwise pleasant leafy lanes around my home. I used to use a Sainsbury's bag which most often was about adequate. But since Sainsbury's and the other bag-bothering supermarkets cut off my supply of decent carrier bags I have been forced to use the micro-thin bags still allowed for wrapping fruit and other perishables, which are all my wife can filch in reasonable quantity. And these really don't cut it. So finding a decent size and strength shopping bag can often be the difference between picking up the litter at the end of the walk or leaving it until the next day.

     The point to this anecdote is that finding a carrier bag is actually quite a rare occurrence (not much more so than before the supermarkets cut off the supply). There is no shortage of other litter. PET bottles, of course – and glass bottles and aluminium cans which seldom seem to get a mention with all this preoccupation with the blight of plastics packaging. I mustn't forget the card cigarette packets either. And the paper detritus. There is plenty of litter to pick up, only some of which is plastic, and normally very little to none of which is carrier bags. I wonder where they all are. They must be in Wales.

Pharmaceuticals sale is a tonic for plastics

Over the past decade big ticket chemical companies have been moving away from the dirty end of industrial chemicals, including plastics and rubber, and towards the sweeter smelling life sciences sector of health care and agriculture. Hoechst, Bayer, DSM, and others have sold or put up for sale parts of their historical polymer empires to don white coats instead of blue overalls.

     So it came as a welcome trend reversal today to see Solvay agree the sale of its pharmaceuticals business to fund expansion in plastics and other chemicals. Maybe life science is becoming a tad crowded now.

     Of course, Solvay is looking at the top end of the plastics business for its growth: it has itself pulled out of polyolefins – although still has a very large foot in PVC – and has gathered a growing portfolio of esoteric high performance materials.

     It is encouraging that in a world where today's shareholder opinion can count for more than tomorrow's industrial strategy, Solvay is showing that plastics is still a sector to bank on.