Re-using plastic water bottles causes CANCER!!!1!!

[ferd burfle]

The plastic used in most water and soda bottles is polyethylene terephthalate or PET. It doesn't use plasticizers since it is inherently flexible in the thin gauges used in beverage bottles.

The plastics industry has taken pains to put out the message that PET has been thoroughly tested and is safe http://www.plasticsinfo.org/s_plasticsinfo/sec_level2_faq.asp?CID=705&DID=2839 . Since the people putting this out have an obvious financial interest in the question, I'd read it with a healthy skepticism. My own take on it is that what they say is reasonable. I'm not an expert in this but I have a degree in toxicology and experience in product substance content legislation and chemical trace analysis.

ferd

 

[stevea]

Several of us have mentioned this issue on this very thread, so I'm not sure why you say you're surprised how few people know about this issue. In fact, just about every other post in this thread has been about bisphenol-A.

And the other half, like posts #2 ,3, 6 act as tho' they've never heard of it. Surprising.

And the evidence that using these hardened plastic bottles is dangerous is mighty weak.

No - it's inconclusive but there have been a series of significant findings in animal studies, certainly not "mighty weak". Not time to get alarmed, but you probably want to replace these.

However, as I've said a couple of times now, that's only an issue for the hardened plastic bottles that are sold as water bottles. That is NOT an issue for refilling bottles that came with bottled water which I'm pretty sure is what the OP was talking about.

The bisphenol issue does only relate to hard, clear (tho' potentially colored) polycarbonate plastics. For example the 5 gallon blue-clear water-cooler plastic bottles (carboys) are made of polycarbonate. Many department store semi-rigid water/drink containers are polycarbonate. I have a bad feeling that some of the clear plastic coffee makers are polycarbonate. If the item has a type "7" in the triangle and the material is optically clear there's an excellent chance it's polycarbonate.

No one is implicating PET (or PETE) plastics used in 2 liter pop bottles and most small (half liter) water/beverage bottles.

HDPE (as used in gallon milk jugs) is also not implicated.

Nalgene is a trade name - and I've used their HDPE labware goods for decades. Nalgene did produce some polycarbonate consumer water bottles and still produces some consumer HDPE water bottles. The Nalgene polycarbonate bottles (optically clear & hard, not cloudy and soft) are of concern. Their HDPE bottles are not.

 

[bruto]

Has it really? Proof that a known carcinogen can in certain circumstances be leached into water is far from conclusive evidence of a known risk to people using the bottles. Someone in this thread pointed out that a normal rinsing removes pretty much any reasonable chance of leaching anything out in quantities large enough to matter. (Heck, there's traces of stuff like arsenic in most municipal water, but that doesn't mean it's not safe.)

So maybe I said it wrong, but it seems to me that if you get the message "your water bottle is probably leaching a carcinogen into the water," and if it costs little or nothing to eliminate it, it makes sense to go ahead and change water bottles, rather than wait for definitive proof or full quantification of the risk. It's silly to panic about your water bottle, but it seems to me that there's a point at which the aversion to acting without complete proof becomes itself perverse.

 

[CurtC]

We don't watch much TV) bought me a Klean Kanteen stainless steel water bottle for father's day.

There were some metal water bottles on the market that had a coating of BPA-containing material on the inside of the bottle, although I think it was just from Sigg and not Klean Kanteen.

 

[cafetimes1991]

I'll tell ya: that's exactly what the bottled water manufacturers and their product retailers wanted to hear. Don't refill the bottle with free tapwater for free - buy a whole new bottle at full price. Or die of cancer.

That's what I believe too.

 

[Stout]

So maybe I said it wrong, but it seems to me that if you get the message "your water bottle is probably leaching a carcinogen into the water," and if it costs little or nothing to eliminate it, it makes sense to go ahead and change water bottles, rather than wait for definitive proof or full quantification of the risk. It's silly to panic about your water bottle, but it seems to me that there's a point at which the aversion to acting without complete proof becomes itself perverse.

Good post, I feel the same way. I'm in no way adverse to replacing my PC water bottle, however I'm not about to make a special trip out to where they sell water bottles to do so. I fill it with fresh water every time I use it ( now, it's twice a week, maybe ) and keep it out of direct sunlight.

Really, it's under 10 dollars at stake here so it's more of a matter of my forgetting to buy a new one than any sort of "stand" on my part.

If, however , we start talking about the harm caused by other plastics and their contact with food in a health context, then I'm going to demand evidence. it seems that pretty much everything I buy and eat has at least some degree of contact with plastic. Avoiding that would be a big deal, that's for sure.

 

[wuschel]

So maybe I said it wrong, but it seems to me that if you get the message "your water bottle is probably leaching a carcinogen into the water," and if it costs little or nothing to eliminate it, it makes sense to go ahead and change water bottles, rather than wait for definitive proof or full quantification of the risk.

It makes no sense to exchange against one made of a material that clearly isn't a chemically inert substance. Plus, due to the lower rate of exposure as far as the average person, the statistical chance of adverse health effects being noticed is far bigger for a system used by billions for decades, rather than one in use by only millions for a couple months.

In other words, using stainless steel bottles might have a ten times higher likelyhood to kill you, but you wouldn't know, due to the lack of heaps over heaps of data, as is the case otherwise.

 

[JoeTheJuggler]

No - it's inconclusive but there have been a series of significant findings in animal studies, certainly not "mighty weak". Not time to get alarmed, but you probably want to replace these.

Again, the leap from these studies (which often focus on heating up the plastic) to the claim that drinking water from these bottles is dangerous is indeed mighty weak.

No one is implicating PET (or PETE) plastics used in 2 liter pop bottles and most small (half liter) water/beverage bottles.

From the way I read the OP, that sounds like exactly what was suggested. Otherwise words like "re-filling" or "using a water bottle multiple times" don't make much sense.

At any rate, as others have mentioned, BPA turns up in all sorts places we might be exposed to it--including canned foods.

 

[Myriad]

I bought my first Nalgene bottles in the early 80's. They were some of the first to be specifically labeled and sold as water bottles for recreational instead of laboratory use, being printed "Nalgene Trail." (It had taken Nalgene a while to realize that so many people who did not work in laboratories, including sporting goods store managers, had been buying the bottles from the laboratory supply distributors who carried them.)

Mine lasted for hundreds of trips over more than 25 years, and no doubt every microgram of BPA that was in them ended up going down our (my wife's and my) gullets. (One, which had previously survived being dropped several storeys' height onto jagged rocks, eventually shattered from merely falling to the ground, indicating that it had very little plasticizer left.) Oh well. I'm sure we're not alone. The bottles are so standard among backpackers, climbers, etc. that other products such as water filters are often specifically designed to fit the cap threads of a Nalgene bottle.

The plastic has been reformulated, so the Nalgene bottles currently sold are claimed to be BPA-free (and the plastic certainly does have a different texture from before). They're also a lot more colorful. But I wonder if they'll be anywhere near as durable. When I bought them I didn't know what BPA meant (my guess was Bad Plastic Additive which I suppose isn't too far off). The animal studies I subsequently read seem to point more to BPA affecting fetal development and growth by acting as an estrogen mimic or something similar, rather than being a proven carcinogen. But that might not have been the most up to date information.

The idea that refilling bottled water bottles is dangerous due to BPA is clearly illogical, for the reasons already explained in the thread.

But the bottled water companies have tried before to discourage refilling. There was a spate of news articles (no doubt triggered by a press release campaign) about two years ago, about studies showing that refilled water bottles contain bacteria. Oddly, the notion that the only plausible source of said bacteria was the drinker's own mouth was never mentioned. (Of course, that points to a certain risk from sharing water bottles but who doesn't already know that?)

There's big money in store for an inventor who can come up with a way to make bottled water bottles impossible to refill, without also making them annoyingly inconvenient to use. Every bottled water seller in the world would license them.

Respectfully,
Myriad

 

[bruto]

It makes no sense to exchange against one made of a material that clearly isn't a chemically inert substance. Plus, due to the lower rate of exposure as far as the average person, the statistical chance of adverse health effects being noticed is far bigger for a system used by billions for decades, rather than one in use by only millions for a couple months.

In other words, using stainless steel bottles might have a ten times higher likelyhood to kill you, but you wouldn't know, due to the lack of heaps over heaps of data, as is the case otherwise.

People have been drinking out of stainless steel thermoses, cups, coffee pots, pitchers and what not for years and years. The stainless water bottles are only a new application of old technology, and if there are no data suggesting that they're dangerous, it seems reasonable to presume they're not, until such data appear.

 

[JoeTheJuggler]

From the FDA's statement on BPA:

At this time, FDA is not recommending that anyone discontinue using products that contain BPA while we continue our risk assessment process. However, concerned consumers should know that several alternatives to polycarbonate baby bottles exist, including glass baby bottles.
<snip>
Based on our ongoing review, we believe there is a large body of evidence that indicates that FDA-regulated products containing BPA currently on the market are safe and that exposure levels to BPA from food contact materials, including for infants and children, are below those that may cause health effects. However, we will continue to consider new research and information as they become available.

The Wikipedia article on BPA is also pretty complete, and even gives the various government positions on the import and sale of these bottles.

I'm curious if anyone who has tossed out their Nalgene water bottles in favor of aluminum or steel bottles also avoids eating canned foods?

 

[wuschel]

People have been drinking out of stainless steel thermoses, cups, coffee pots, pitchers and what not for years and years.

Except for thermoses, neither application has a similar usage pattern, meaning the liquid stays inside the container for just a short amount of time (plus air circulation...)

Stainless steel termoses (as opposed to ones made of glass) do not even remotely have the numbers of usage incidents plastic water containers receive. Let alone the plastic water pipes that replaced the lead(!) plumbing the water flows through before it arrives at the tap from where you fill it into your stainless steel safety container.

If plactic bottles had a one in ten million chance of killing you over the course of 20 years, there would be thousands of deaths world wide until now.

Same for stainless, but a one in one millon chance over the course of 20 years might not have led to even a single casuality until now, hence going completely unnoticed.

NB: Not going to want to spoil your sense of safety... but:

"Leaching of heavy metals (Cr, Fe, and Ni) from stainless steel utensils in food simulants and food materials" -
R. Kumar, P. K. Srivastava and S. P. Srivastava

 

[bruto]

....
NB: Not going to want to spoil your sense of safety... but:

"Leaching of heavy metals (Cr, Fe, and Ni) from stainless steel utensils in food simulants and food materials" -
R. Kumar, P. K. Srivastava and S. P. Srivastava

OK, I give up. We're all gonna die. It's obvious we should just give up water bottles altogether and switch to beer.

"En botella, wey!"

 

[Foolmewunz]

OK, I give up. We're all gonna die. It's obvious we should just give up water bottles altogether and switch to beer.

"En botella, wey!"

Well, Marcello would like that - he loves sneaking sips of beer from visitors/friends - but I don't know if I'd want to deal with him with a hangover (his). He's demanding enough, as it is.

 

[wuschel]

It's obvious we should just give up water bottles altogether and switch to beer.

That seems like an universally agreeable proposition!

 

[StanBearclaw]

NB: Not going to want to spoil your sense of safety... but:

"Leaching of heavy metals (Cr, Fe, and Ni) from stainless steel utensils in food simulants and food materials" -
R. Kumar, P. K. Srivastava and S. P. Srivastava

Am I missing something? All that showed was that a study was done, it didn't give any indication as to the results.

 

[wuschel]

Am I missing something? All that showed was that a study was done, it didn't give any indication as to the results.

Even in the absence of actual numbers, the process of leaching itself is pretty much undisputed, hence the "better safe than sorry" approach fails when one unquantified minor risk is replaced with another unquantified minor risk.

Which pretty much has been my point.

Actual numbers can be found e.g. here, even though the source does not seem to be entirely unbiased: http://www.sigg.com/fileadmin/Datei.../Zertifikate/Metal_Leach_Testing_May_2008.pdf

Yep! Seems Aluminium would have been the proper... err... "solution", instead! Y'all got it wrong, and are therefore going to die!

 

[StanBearclaw]

But given the option of the unquantified minor risk of a rash due to nickel sensitivity, or the unquantified risk of hermaphrodite flipper babies, I know which I'm going to choose.

 

[Third Eye Open]

What I am understanding is that even if there is some harmful chemical in the plastic bottle, the amount in one bottle is negligible. So I would be actually safer using one bottle for months at a time then buying new ones with a fresh dose of chemicals in them.

This scare is making less and less sense to me.

 

[StanBearclaw]

What I am understanding is that even if there is some harmful chemical in the plastic bottle, the amount in one bottle is negligible. So I would be actually safer using one bottle for months at a time then buying new ones with a fresh dose of chemicals in them.

This scare is making less and less sense to me.

Correct. You wouldn't want to replace your current BPA-containing bottle with a NEW BPA-containing bottle. That's pretty elementary.