Badwater: Killer Water Bottles

7-September 2008: With all the talk about the hazards of BPAs this summer, Julie was on a mission to find suitable replacement water bottles where

It wasn't until we returned from our Africa trip last July that we started to hear about and read about the problems with BPAs. I know we were behind the curve in terms of getting this bit of news, but this particular bogie got us really concerned. Besides, better late than never, right?

In case you don't know what BPAs are, it stands for Bisphenol-a, which is chemical found in hard plastic products from tupperware, baby bottles, sports bottles (including the Nalgenes we were using), and many other food packagings for the sake of convenience. It turns out that BPAs can be carcinogenic (cancer causing) as well as cause undesired hormonal changes (e.g. genital deformities, bad semen, and premature puberty, among others). Apparently, heat facilitates the leaching of BPAs from the plastic containers into the food or liquids they contain. Thus, if you're microwaving food sitting in a tupperware or your Nalgene bottle full of water has been sitting out in the sun for a while, you could very well be ingesting this stuff!

The more I think about how this has managed to slip by the FDA (Food and Drug Administration), the more I come back to the same conclusion that it's yet another example of how corporations run our government (especially under the Republican-dominated Bush Administration of the last eight years). You can't trust anything regulated by the US government from the Federal Reserve to the EPA to the FDA to anything else the Bush Administration and Republican apologists have managed to corrupt. We even heard radio advertisements (funded by plastic and oil companies) urging listeners to not support a California ban on BPAs since they're instrumental in the manufacture of all packagings involving convenience. I felt that I should've known better with this issue, but I guess I can only act going forward right now trying not to mind the damage already done.

Fine. So what do we do?

First off, we learned that a good indicator of BPAs or polycarbonates in products is by looking for the recycle "7" at the bottom of bottles and tupperwares. After further inspection of all the stuff we have that were in question, it pretty much pointed to almost everything plastic from our Nalgenes to our Ziplock tupperwares to even our plastic water bottles bought from the supermarket.

Indeed upon coming to terms with the reality of the situation, we got rid of all our food-touching plastics with the recycle "7" underneath. Julie also replaced my trusty Nalgenes with a Camelbak BPA-free water bottle that was made of a different plastic. We continued life under this paradigm for a few days and tried to get adjusted.

However, the more we thought about it, the more we wondered whether BPAs were merely the tip of the iceberg. After all, if you're as skeptical of the FDA as we were (and becoming more so with each moment), we started to suspect other plastics that didn't explicitly call out the recycle "7" or "PC". So we started to wonder about our Camelbak Bladders as well as the newly-bought Camelbak water bottles.

So in not taking any chances, we switched out the Camelbak water bottle I had been taking to work in favor of the stainless steel Klean Kantene water bottle. It was a bit more fragile than the bomb-proof Nalgene, but perhaps it would give me a little more peace of mind with my health. Still, I managed to dent my bottle during my first week of use in an elevator at work after dropping it accidentally.

Meanwhile, we forked out for a water filter (to reduce our consumption of plastic), switched water containers at home to jugs and carafes made of glass, and switched to glass tupperware. Sure glass made things much heavier and more fragile, but at least they were re-usable and wouldn't add to the landfills (thus somewhat appealing to our desire to reduce our environmental footprint).

Anyhow, this is the path forward we're taking for a reduced reliance on plastics or other chemical compounds (let alone BPAs) in storing foods and liquids. It has been over two weeks since we made the change and so far the lifestyle adjustment hasn't been all that bad. Still, we wonder what other unpleasant FDA oversights might creep in and undermine consumer confidence...

Update 9/12/2008! After purchasing Klean Kantene stainless steel bottles (one 27oz. and the other a 40oz.), Julie came across a disturbing review on REI.com (read the review by Backpack Brian from Dallas, TX here). It said that the 40oz. bottles were not made of stainless steel and one could do a magnet test to verify it wasn't truly stainless steel.

So Julie went about doing that test.

With the 27oz. bottle, our refrigerator magnets didn't stick as expected. We knew that because our stainless steel refrigerator door doesn't allow magnets to stick either.

However, on the 40oz. bottle (the one I was bringing to work), it stuck!

Both of us suspect that the manufacturer was probably a Chinese company (for low cost) who cut corners, but we don't know whether Klean Kantene was at fault or the manufacturer lied and cut corners. It doesn't matter.

To play devil's advocate, I guess I can get an idea of the decision-making process here. After all, the 40oz. bottle requires more of the material than the smaller bottles.

Moreover, we noticed there was a spot of rust inside the 40oz. bottle, which we thought was suspect since stainless steel (especially from a new bottle) normally doesn't rust.

Anyways, the lesson we learned here is to always keep an open mind about things like this. Even though we're continuing to go with the Klean Kantene bottles going forward (only the 27oz. bottles not made in China though), it was rather fortuitous that Julie stumbled upon that review regarding the larger bottles.

Lucky us!