Rust: The Longest War

by Jonathan Waldman

  The dime-sized nozzles through which the coatings squirt are manufactured and studied and chosen with similar attention. They’re made by the Nordson Corporation, in Amherst, Ohio. Nordson, which boasts recent growth not unlike Ball’s, makes an immense variety of “dispensing equipment,” including more than 1,500 airless nozzles just for coatings. Engineers at Nordson, minding turbulence and vortexes, study how the coatings atomize as they are forced out of a tungsten carbide orifice a few thousandths of an inch wide. The atomized molecules emerge in a flat spray, such that a uniform film thickness distribution may be achieved. For every nozzle Nordson engineers produce, they also produce a map of its spray pattern. In this way, they also ensure the cardiac health of can makers.

  The spray machines—a half ton and $2 million each—are designed within equally precise parameters. Ball’s spray machines are made by Stolle Machinery, in suburban Denver. Tom Beebe, a salesman who’s been working on cans since 1970, showed me one of the machines as it was being assembled by a mechanic. This alone was a feat, requiring consent to take no photographs, since Stolle is as secretive about its machines as Valspar and Nordson are of their coatings and nozzles. Beebe wouldn’t discuss coatings, and two IC spray machine engineers in the office were equally reticent. The first one said, “I have no comment,” and insisted I get approval from higher-ups before talking. The second walked by without comment.

  Ball, which annually spends about $200 million on coatings, stores the stuff at its Golden plant in two ten-thousand-gallon stainless steel tanks, eight feet in diameter and two stories tall. During Can School, they were not part of the tour.

  The second day of Can School started ominously, with dark clouds over the Rockies. I sipped from a can of tomato juice—a can-making achievement of its own, since, according to one chemist, “tomato sauce is probably the nastiest stuff you’re gonna come across”—and listened to a range of Ball employees: the VP of sales, the manager of manufacturing engineering, the director of graphics services. I heard Mary Chopyak say that she spent two years working on BPA-free coatings. I heard Dan Vorlage, Ball’s head of innovation, describe being stymied by his work on BPA-free coatings. Then, at eleven thirty, Paul DiLucchio, Ball’s training and development manager, tapped my shoulder and whispered that someone wanted to see me in the hallway.

  I grabbed my recorder and notes, and prepared never to step back into the room. I assumed the worst was in store. Walking out, I could feel my heart beating. In the hallway, Scott McCarty was waiting. He had his cell phone to his ear. I figured that meant others were on the way.

  McCarty got straight to the point. He asked what I was doing there. I told him that I thought he or someone at Ball had changed his mind and invited me. I mentioned the email from Reichard. McCarty repeated himself, and asked if I hadn’t understood him when he’d called. I said I had, but then Reichard invited me. McCarty looked annoyed. I told him that I had announced who I was at the security desk, and that if Ball had meant to keep me out, the company had had the opportunity.

  McCarty changed tactics, told me he thought rust was a silly subject to write about, and asked how cans were related. I told him that I was writing about can manufacturing and all of the associated processes devised to prevent rust. McCarty said he still didn’t think my book was a good idea or that anybody would want to read about cans. I thought, “That’s why I’m me and you’re you,” but I said, “Let me worry about that.” I also told him I’d already talked to Laperle and had taken a tour of the corrosion lab. McCarty dismissed Laperle. “He’s pretty much retired,” he said. “He doesn’t even work for us anymore.” “Really?” I said. “Last time I checked, he was the director of your corrosion lab.” (He still is.) The conversation went around in circles for fifteen minutes. Finally, he yielded, begrudgingly. Since I’d already attended half of Can School, he said, I might as well stay for the rest.

  From then on, though, I was persona non grata.

  Positioned squarely between the industry and the thirsty consumer is the FDA’s Center for Food Safety and Nutrition. Federal food-safety regulations, established a generation ago and amended since then, require anything in or touching foods and beverages to meet certain standards. So, after a coating manufacturer designs a coating that satisfies its rheological and organoleptic dreams, a hurdle remains before Bob can employ it to defend cans from his new energy drink.

  The approval process is a world unto its own, hidden within the FDA and a handful of private labs. The labs—including Avomeen Analytical Services, Intertek, SGS, and Eurofins—run simulations to see if coatings are fully cured and stable and to determine the toxicology of the migrants that inevitably emerge. The FDA just reviews the data or asks for more. In shorthand, labs call these tests 21CFR tests, after the particular section of the code of federal regulations that requires them, but, really, they’re full migration studies with new food contact substances. The results are reported in FCNs, or food contact notifications. They take a few months to produce and cost about $100,000. Hundreds of pages long and incredibly technical, they are not a pleasure to read.

  Here’s how the process works: a coatings company sends Avomeen a box containing a pint of a new coating and ten stainless steel plates covered with it. An Avomeen chemist takes two-inch squares of the coated metal and places them in a hot simulant—either vinegar, ethanol, or olive oil. According to an FDA chemist named Mike Adams, these simulants accurately mimic package-product interactions. There the metal pieces sit (in triplicate) for two hours, a day, four days, ten days. In each case, he evaporates the simulant, weighs the residue, and computes its concentration.

  Then Avomeen chemists examine the migrant or migrants they’ve found. From a new coating, they might find only one analyte or a half dozen. If it’s a chemical that’s been studied, they can look up its properties. If it’s something unknown, they study it, and how they study it is determined by its concentration. But here’s the key: if the analyte shows up in concentrations lower than 0.5 ppb (parts per billion), the FDA considers it good. Below that threshold, Avomeen need not conduct mutagenicity or carcinogenicity tests. Below that level, the FDA requires no multigenerational feeding studies.

  Behind a hefty regulatory cover letter drafted by lawyers, Avomeen then submits its report. The FDA, which normally reviews about a hundred FCNs a year (at least half of which are for new coatings), then has four months to raise any objections. Since 2000, about 90 percent of FCNs have passed. They’re accessible to the public online. The details—like the chemicals that emerge in minute quantities—are not.

  The Can Manufacturers Institute is, not surprisingly, addicted to discussing the benefits of aluminum. The organization infinitely recycles its line about aluminum being infinitely recyclable. The CMI also extols every other virtue of the can: it’s cheap, stackable, eminently shippable, and safe—all of which was evident by the conclusion of Can School. The organization announces that cans prevent light and UV penetration better than glass or plastic bottles, that cans cool down faster than glass or plastic, that they keep out oxygen better. It points out that food-borne bacteria kill 5,000 people a year and hospitalize another 350,000, averaging $1,850 annually per US citizen. Affirming that no such illness has resulted from a can for thirty years, it praises the greatness of the can. Remember, it insists, that a fifth of all American dinners include something from a can. When BPA concerns are raised, they cite studies they maintain confirm that BPA levels in cans are safe.

  The North American Metal Packaging Alliance similarly dismisses the importance of BPA. In a 2011 press release, NAMPA urged policy makers and media to “take heed of a decisive analysis by independent toxicologists that concludes bisphenol-A (BPA) poses no risk to human health.” NAMPA’s chairman, John Rost, has called coatings critical and safe, and encouraged decision-making restraint to keep any legislator from acting with haste. Rost, a trained chemist, is also a lobbyist. BPA coatings, he has said, provide superior performance, without even a “marginal health r
isk,” and have been reviewed by health agencies. That, and there’s no readily available alternative.

  The American Chemistry Council, too, seeks to allay worries over BPA. At the websites Bisphenol-A (www.bisphenol-a.org) and Facts About BPA (www.factsaboutbpa.org), which were registered by the ACC, the group debunks nine BPA myths, mostly by pointing to the lack of a “sound scientific basis.”

  Ball employees haven’t developed a coherent strategy. Some attempt a mild deception, by calling the epoxies “organic coatings.” Of course, aldrin and dioxin are organic, too—and toxic in minute quantities. Others employ a few more syllables, calling the epoxies “water-based polymers.” Mention BPA, and everyone at Ball seems to get tense. Scott Brendecke, the corrosion engineer, stammered so after I mentioned BPA that he lost his train of thought. Paul DiLucchio said BPA is perfectly fine and that everybody refuses to understand as much. Another employee shrugged suggestively, raising one eyebrow at the mention of BPA. All he said was, “Hey, intent.” With that—wink wink, nudge nudge—he walked away. To that end, I heard one employee call Ball a “practical provider of solutions,” and another say he just provided options.

  Can makers argue that modern society offers plenty of exposure to BPA outside of cans, and that it’s been deemed safe; that the quantity of BPA in each can is minuscule; that even less migrates into beverages; that the quantity detected in humans is even smaller (“extremely small”); and that, regardless, any absorbed BPA gets expelled daily in urine. “There is a danger of over-reaction to issues relating to migration if the available data is not put into the context of the actual low levels to which consumers are exposed,” writes the can consultant Bev Page. They say that the relationship between BPA and health effects is associative at best, and furthermore, that studies on mice aren’t relevant in people, and that the results of many such studies are not reproducible. Finally, they say that major regulatory bodies in Japan, Australia, New Zealand, Canada, and the United States agree that current levels of BPA exposure are safe, and that one, the European Food Safety Authority, recently recommended increasing the tolerable daily intake of BPA by a factor of five.

  “Agree” and “safe,” though, are at odds with the opinion of the US Health and Human Services Department. HHS has said that parents should do all they can to limit BPA exposure in their infants. “Concern over potential harm from BPA is highest for young children,” the agency warns, “because their bodies are early in development and have immature systems for detoxifying chemicals.” The National Toxicology Program takes a similar stance: “The NTP has some concern for effects on the brain, behavior, and prostate gland in fetuses, infants, and children at current human exposures to bisphenol A.” It ranks concern on a five-step scale, from negligible concern, to minimal concern, to some concern, to regular concern, to serious concern. It has some. The American Medical Association feels the same way. Even the FDA recently declared: “Results of recent studies using novel approaches and different endpoints describe BPA effects in laboratory animals at very low doses corresponding to some estimated human exposures. Many of these new studies evaluated developmental or behavioral effects that are not typically assessed in standardized tests.”

  Frederick vom Saal, who has been studying hormones as long as Scheuerman has been studying cans, has found that BPA is as potent as DES, able to act far below the FDA’s threshold, below 1 part per trillion (ppt). In 2004 the CDC found that of 2,517 people six years and older, 93 percent of them had BPA in their urine. A 2012 study in Ontario found that workers in food canning (not can making) had twice the risk of breast cancer than the general population, fivefold if they were premenopausal. A 2008 study in Shanghai found a threefold risk, as did a 2000 study in British Columbia. The authors wrote, “It is plausible that they were exposed to BPA from can linings.”

  While Americans debated uncertainties, other countries made decisions. Canada added BPA to the list of toxic chemicals under the Canadian Environmental Protection Act. France voted to continue with a ban on BPA-based polycarbonate bottles. Denmark voted to continue with a ban on BPA in food packaging meant for children under age three. Japan has nearly eliminated BPA can coatings. The United Nations Food and Agriculture Organization and the World Health Organization convened a four-day joint meeting on the subject. Yet a commonly held view in America is that best expressed by Governor Paul LePage of Maine. “The only thing that I’ve heard,” he told the Bangor Daily News, “is if you take a plastic bottle and put it in the microwave and you heat it up, it gives off a chemical similar to estrogen. So the worst case is some women may have little beards.”

  At the conclusion of the third day of Beverage Can School, DiLucchio—the man who had tapped me on the shoulder—thanked the attendees, expressed his gratitude, and told everyone about the certificates awaiting us on the table beside the door.

  I collected my stuff, chatted up a few more people, and took a look. There were a few dozen certificates on the table, in alphabetical order. They said:

  In recognition of your contribution to the Ball Corporation Beverage Can School, on April 12–14, 2011, in Broomfield, Colorado

  Joe Shmoe

  Is hereby inducted into the

  ORDER OF THE CAN MAKER

  after completing 16 hours of can school training, and is entitled to all the rights and benefits thereof, including the right to high quality beverage cans and responsive customer service from Ball Corporation.

  John A. Hayes,

  President and Chief Executive Officer, Ball Corporation

  Michael Hranicka,

  President, Metal Beverage Packaging Americas

  Those with last names at the end of the alphabet—Vuolo, Wang, Wonson, Zeund, Zivkovic—were at the bottom-right corner of the table. I looked again, but couldn’t find Waldman. Everybody got a certificate except for me.

  A month after Beverage Can School, I returned to Ball headquarters for Food Can School. I showed up fifteen minutes early; this time, I was kicked out before the program started. McCarty told me it was “over capacity,” though there were a half dozen empty seats. When I observed, afterward, over email, “It sure seems like you’re trying to hide something,” he responded three minutes later: “I’ll take that as an attempt at humor. Feel free to send me any questions.” He never responded to my questions.

  A half century ago, in Silent Spring, Rachel Carson wrote, “For the first time in the history of the world, every human being is now subjected to contact with dangerous chemicals, from the moment of conception until death.” Carson described chemicals accumulating in the sex organs of mammals. She described low sperm counts in pilots who sprayed pesticides. She described the terrifyingly abrupt deaths of chemical handlers who goofed up and accidentally touched products they didn’t know not to. She called some of the chemicals “elixirs of death.”

  When Rachel Carson wrote Silent Spring, she noted that one out of four Americans would get cancer in their lifetimes. Now the rate is almost twice that. Since she died in 1964, we’ve detonated 1,439 more nuclear bombs around the world, about half of them in the southwestern United States. We’ve banned DDT, but we’ve also introduced BPA into so many things that it’s easier to list the products that don’t contain it. Chemical World News, in a tone today echoed by the CMI, NAMPA, and the American Chemistry Council, called Silent Spring “Science fiction, to be read in the same way that the TV program The Twilight Zone is to be watched.” I thought the book was far more frightening than any TV show, old or new. Carson wrote, “If we are going to live so intimately with these chemicals—eating and drinking them, taking them into the very marrow of our bones—we had better know something about their nature and their power.” She didn’t even know many of the compounds had the ability to alter human hormone systems, or that we would produce products containing them billions of times over, marketing them to children, selling them in vending machines in schools.

  As Florence Williams writes in Breasts: A Natural and Unnatural History, “Our
pursuit of the good life—controlling reproduction, smoking, drinking, reading fine literature while lazing about indoors—also contributes to our plight . . . We’ve overloaded a fragile biochemical machine. We’re a living mismatch between our wiring and our desires.” Williams knows. She had her urine tested for BPA. It had 5.14 parts per billion, in the upper 25 percent of Americans like her, but still four hundred times lower than what the US Environmental Protection Agency considers a safe dose. She changed her diet for a few days, and got her urine tested again. She got it down to 0.759 ppb. She’s a mother of two. She had her six-year-old daughter’s urine checked too. It was 0.786 ppb.

  Patrick Rose, a lawyer who sued Ball unsuccessfully in a 1999 exploding can case, is more concerned about BPA than explosions. “I won’t drink out of a can,” he told me. “I won’t let them near my kid. I’m kinda surprised this hasn’t trickled down into the popular culture.” He said he thinks the huge increase in breast cancer incidences is related to BPA. “We’re ruining women’s health,” he said, “and it’s totally preventable.”

  Jamil Baghdachi, the can coatings consultant who runs the Coatings Research Institute, is similarly fearful. “It scares the hell out of me,” he said. “I’d rather have a glass. What if it’s not cured? What if some of the chemicals exude out?” He said, “I’ve seen the chemistry; I see it on a daily basis . . . I know what can go wrong, how it can go wrong.” He calls cans “suspicious” and doesn’t buy canned food. He told me he’d like to write an op-ed—as Florence Williams did—in the New York Times. “The less you know, the better your life is. The more you know, the more you worry . . . There’s no equation for it. It’s a perception. I’ve got that perception because of my awareness.”