Ooooh, some juicy BPA gossip!

My next door neighbor, she's a bit of a smarty. I mean, she really is really smart. She's an engineer, her husband is a radiation oncologist, and neither one of them takes care of their yard.

Come to think of it, all of my bordering neighbors are smarties. The husband on the other side is a lab rat scientist at Washinton University culturing microbes that can't be cultured. He strings Christmas lights around the house 365 days out of the year, and takes lithium to stabilize his moods. Apparently he was off his meds a few years ago when he reported me to the city council for having an illegal fence. The fence was perfectly legal. He is part of the reason I'd like to move. They also don't take care of their yard.

Oh, wait, this post isn't about how my neighbors slack on their lawn care. This is about plastics.

While the kids were playing tonight, we were talking about her job and the uproar over BPA. She's an engineer in packaging for a large beverage company. If I said the name, you'd totally know what it is, but I won't.

Remember the recent publicity over the dangers of BPA in plastic baby bottles? It made the news. Lots of glass manufacturers made money selling glass bottles {by the way, the dangers of a broken glass bottle are real, too, you know}.

She said, get this, that BPA is inside of every single aluminum can out there! They use it in an epoxy to coat the insides of the cans. Formula cans, soda cans, beer cans, vegetable cans. You name it, it has BPA inside it. Supposedly in the epoxy it's more stable, but the chemical make-up is such that heat combined with water breaks down it's solidity. Or something like that, my brain went a little mushy as the chemical compounds starting flying in the conversation.

I think it's sort of funny, this little secret. Which is widely known by smarties and chemists worldwide. Apparently the rocket surgeon at the AP that broke the story failed to research just how common BPA is.

She also said the can industry is totally keeping their head down and breathing a huge sigh of relief that they weren't implicated {yet} in the massive BPA scandal.

You learn something new every day.