Bisphenol A (BPA) is a chemical compound primarily used in the manufacturing of various plastics. It is a colourless solid which is soluble in most common organic solvents, but has very poor solubility in water. BPA is produced on an industrial scale by the condensation reaction of phenol and acetone. Global production in 2022 was estimated to be in the region of 10 million tonnes.
BPA's largest single application is as a co-monomer in the production of polycarbonates, which accounts for 65–70% of all BPA production. The manufacturing of epoxy resins and vinyl ester resins account for 25–30% of BPA use. The remaining 5% is used as a major component of several high-performance plastics, and as a minor additive in polyvinyl chloride (PVC), polyurethane, thermal paper, and several other materials. It is not a plasticizer, although it is often wrongly labelled as such.
Discovered by embedding cosine similarity (sentence-transformers MiniLM, 384-dim).