Reading the label
BPA-free is a true claim about one molecule. The chemicals that replaced it — BPS, BPF and a handful of others — are structurally near-identical, are not labelled anywhere, and the 2025 evidence does not support treating them as safer.
“BPA-free” is probably the most successful safety label in kitchenware. It is also one of the narrowest. It tells you that one specific molecule — bisphenol A — is not in the product. It says nothing whatsoever about the dozen or so close chemical relatives that manufacturers replaced it with.
That would be a pedantic objection if the replacements had turned out fine. Increasingly, the published evidence says they have not.
In April 2023, the European Food Safety Authority re-evaluated BPA and cut its tolerable daily intake from 4 micrograms per kilogram of body weight per day to 0.2 nanograms — a reduction of roughly twenty thousand-fold. EFSA concluded that dietary exposure to BPA “is a health concern for consumers across all age groups”. The opinion is here.
Worth knowing, because we would rather you had the whole picture: Germany’s federal risk institute, the BfR, publicly disagreed with EFSA’s methodology. This is not a settled consensus number. It is, however, the number European law now acts on.
Commission Regulation (EU) 2024/3190, adopted in December 2024, prohibits BPA in food contact materials with narrow exceptions. The main transition deadline for placing most articles on the market fell on 20 July 2026, with longer runways to 2028 and 2029 for some categories. A clear summary of the scope is here, and the Food Packaging Forum covered the July 2026 deadline.
There is no equivalent US ban. The FDA removed BPA from baby bottles and sippy cups in 2012, but did so because industry had already abandoned those uses, not on a safety finding.
The substitutes are mostly BPS (bisphenol S) and BPF (bisphenol F), with BPAF and BPZ appearing in smaller volumes. Structurally they are the same scaffold with a different bridge between two phenol rings.
The most useful recent work is Srebny et al. (2025), published in Environmental Science & Technology on 16 August 2025. The team tested BPA plus 26 alternatives across a battery of in-vitro assays. Their findings, in short:
Their conclusion is quotable and blunt: many BPA replacements are “regrettable substitutions”, and bisphenols should be assessed as a group rather than cleared one at a time. Summary here.
These are cell-based assays, not human exposure studies. An in-vitro signal tells you a molecule can do something to a cell at a given concentration. It does not tell you that your food container is dosing you at that concentration. What it does do is dismantle the specific claim that BPS and BPF are known-safer alternatives — that claim was never supported, and now has evidence against it.
This is where careful wording matters, and where a lot of consumer content overstates.
The EU regulation does more than ban BPA. It also restricts other bisphenols classified as carcinogenic, mutagenic or toxic for reproduction in categories 1A or 1B, or as category 1 endocrine disruptors, unless specifically authorised. BPS is explicitly named and removed from earlier exemptions, with a transitional window to seek authorisation.
So: BPS is not banned in the EU the way BPA is. It is subject to a hazard-based, case-by-case authorisation process. Anyone telling you Europe has banned BPS is ahead of the facts. Harvard’s Petrie-Flom Center has a good treatment of how regulators are struggling with exactly this.
Here is what makes this genuinely difficult rather than merely annoying. There is no label for BPS or BPF. A product marked “BPA-free” may contain BPS, BPF, both, or neither, and nothing on the packaging distinguishes those cases.
Resin identification codes do not help either — the number in the triangle tells you the polymer family, not the additives. Polycarbonate (often code 7) is the classic bisphenol-containing plastic, but code 7 is a catch-all that also covers plenty of unrelated materials.
Which leaves the honest answer: if avoiding bisphenols matters to you, the reliable route is not reading labels more carefully. It is choosing a material that cannot contain them.
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