In the main feature of the daily newspaper Washington Spectator of June 1, 2013 the journalist Lou Dubose states that Eastman Chemical Company is using a court case to silence two laboratories in order to prevent a scandal about its disputably estrogenically active (EA) resin Tritan®. The two small Texan laboratories CertiChem and PlastiPure detected Tritan®’s estrogenic activity using a cell proliferation assay sensitive to estrogen like compounds. Eastman filed the case with a Texan Federal court in 2011 after Cathy Yang, a scientist at CertiChem, published the results in the peer-reviewed scientific journal Environmental Health Perspectives. Eastman is asking the court to enjoin the laboratories from saying that Tritan® exhibits any measureable level of EA and from claiming that their MCF-7 test is able to determine endocrine activity.
Dubose points out that the court documents reveal that Eastman uses triphenyl phosphate (TPP), another estrogenically active plasticizer. Dubose reports that a study published on the estrogenicity of TPP was funded by Eastman and used to establish the safety of the substance. Laura Vandenberg, witness in the case and endocrine scientist at Tufts University, U.S. states that the doses used in the latter study were far too low to detect a weak estrogen like activity of TPP.
Tritan® is marketed by Eastman as non-estrogenic active. In consequence, many manufacturers of food contact materials, including the bottle manufacturer Nalgene, have switched to the BPA free alternative.
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