Aggregate Exposure and Cumulative Risk Assessment of the Bisphenols BPA, BPS, BPF, and BPAF for the French Population

Bisphenol A (BPA) is used in the production of polycarbonate plastics and epoxy resins and for the color development in thermal paper (TP). In the EU, since 2011 its use in plastic materials and articles intended to come into contact with food is subject to a migration limit.In view of the increasingly strict legislation, industry has partly turned towards replacement chemicals for BPA, such as bisphenol S (BPS), bisphenol F (BPF), and bisphenol AF (BPAF). These analogues can e.g. be found in foodstuffs, indoor dust, and thermal paper. Several studies showed that they exert estrogenic effects just like BPA.To evaluate whether the European BPA restrictions had effects on exposures to BPA and its analogues, we conducted comparative exposure and risk assessments for the time before and after the year 2011. We modeled exposures for European consumers and further focused on the French population. We regarded all sources, which significantly contributed to exposure in previous assessments: dietary and dust ingestion, and dermal exposure from personal care products (PCPs) and TP. Wherever possible, we used concentration data from before and after 2011, respectively.We used the Monte Carlo Risk Assessment (MCRA) model for dietary exposure, the Probabilistic Aggregate Consumer Exposure Model (PACEM) for exposure to PCPs and other probabilistic models for TP and dust. We aggregated the realistic external exposures from different sources by means of a physiologically based pharmacokinetic (PBPK) model developed previously for these bisphenol analogues, yielding internal exposures. We used relative potency factors to estimate the cumulative risk that could result from combined internal exposure to BPA, BPS, BPF, and BPAF. For this, we compared the margins between effective concentrations and the cumulative internal exposures for the time before and after 2011.