For obscure reasons, I’ve had a case of bottled spring water sitting on the landing at the top of the basement stairs untouched for what must be several years now. Normally I keep it in the garage in the winter and down in the basement in the summer. Now that warm weather is here it’s time to move the water from the garage down into the basement, but I figured, may as well have one of those old bottles sitting at the top of the stairs.
I believe spring water is supposed to have an expiry date, though I can’t find it on the current bottles. But hey, water doesn’t expire, right, so who cares?
Well, boy was I surprised when I picked up one of these bottles. The plastic had a completely different feel than normal – it felt extremely flimsy, like it was halfway to becoming a plastic bag rather than a bottle!
ISTM that the most likely way this happened was the plastic interacting with the water over the years – i.e.- some elements of the plastic leeching into the water! This seems far more likely than the plastic interacting with the outside air.
I’m now somewhat more concerned about plastic containers than I was before. In any case, no way I’m drinking that water! I never would have believed such a phenomenon to be possible in a relatively short span of time!
And that’s probably the right direction to go in. I’d developed awareness of how bad plastic is for the ocean a long time ago (I’ve walked on enough Indonesian beaches where you can’t see the sand anymore due to plastic debris), but the problem is worse than large chunks of plastic littering the land and water. It’s the degradation of plastic, and the resultant introduction of microplastics into everything, that is even more alarming from an environmental and health standpoint.
I started this thread a while back and since then I’ve learned enough to realize that we ought to be using plastic only where we really need it, for example in medical devices.
I continue to use the plastic I own, and of course it is pretty much impossible to live a normal first-world life without constantly consuming plastic, but I do everything I can to avoid it. Plastic water bottles can and should be avoided.
In fairness, both brands of bottled water that I regularly buy claim to be made from recycled plastic, and I scrupulously recycle them again. Unless either the bottled water providers or the recyclers are lying to me, I should not – in theory at least – be contributing to the plastic problem.
To be clear though, my complaint here is about the potential health hazards of plastic. I’m shocked that plastic from the bottles appears to have leached into the water. That’s deeply concerning.
Some water bottles are extremely flimsy even when brand new. By making them thinner, they can both save costs and reduce waste, and it’s not like a water bottle needs to be all that strong or durable.
A manufacturer can claim to be using “recycled” plastic by using even a fraction of a percent of recycled materials, and even if these are “recycled” from leftover sprue that was never incorporated into manufactured products.
The polyethylene terephthalate (PET) used in beverage bottles, among many other applications, will break down by both exposure to ultraviolet radiation and hydrolysis (reaction with water). If you’ve ever handled old discarded plastic water or soda bottles this is evident as they are brittle and tear easily. When people say that “plastic lasts forever in the environment”, they do not mean that products make from polymers will retain their original properties or mechanical integrity ‘forever’ (which should be obviously not true to anyone who has seen plastic patio furniture after it has set out in the weather for a few years) but that the residues of the decayed polymer will remain in the water and soil for millennia.
And the same applies whenever someone brings up one of the handful of bacteria that break down plastics; yes, there are bacteria (and fungi) that produce specific enzymes that can break down certain polymers but they don’t reduce them to basic elements or simple organic molecules; they just reduce them to shorter chain polymers and monomers that are actually more biologically available than the original intact polymer.
By the way, aluminum and non-stainless steel containers are also lined with polymer liners to prevent them from reacting to the metals, so just using all metal containers is not a solution to prevent the leaching of polymer components Plastic in a fundamental material in our food, medical, and packaging infrastructure and there is nothing that can really replace it, but it comes with significant concerns with the environmental residues it produces.
These are not separate issues - all plastic degrades, whether you are recycling it or not, and microplastics, which are becoming ever-more ubiquitous, are bad for everyone’s health.
And apparently, the processes that are used to recycle plastic can increase the rate at which microplastics are added to the environment. So, the only long-term win is to avoid using plastic altogether.
Meanwhile here in the real world, we have to do our imperfect best. I prefer to drink bottled water,* but I don’t buy individual serving bottles. I have reusable 3-gallon size water jugs that I fill from commercial outlets (Hawai’i County dispenses it for free as well but not anywhere near me), and I serve myself out of a reusable dispenser that sits on my counter. If I want to take a portable water supply, I own refillable water bottles (some old ones are plastic but all the ones purchased since I became more sensitive are metal).
Now, both the jugs and dispenser are made of plastic. And I did have to buy a new dispenser a while back when the one I’d been using for three years or so developed a leak. And I’d bet good money that the dispensing machines have plenty of plastic parts. So my methods aren’t perfect - but they are better than constantly buying single-serve water bottles.
*Incidentally, I know that bottled water is often a crock, and that tests show that the quality of people’s tap water and the bottled water they buy is the same - sometimes even from the same source, just delivered differently! But I grew up on well water and am sensitive to even minor differences. I have no trouble tasting the difference between the tap water in my house and the bottled water I buy - they are very different, and when I don’t drink tap water (in which I can taste the chlorine) I don’t get the mild IBS symptoms that otherwise plague me.
I used to buy bottled water in those one-gallon plastic milk jugs. They have an ungenerous expiration date, and boy is that correct. I put a bunch up in the attic, and in a matter of months half of them had leaked. Luckily the leaks were slow enough that evaporation prevented the attic floor from damage other than stains. Perhaps the jugs are designed to be semi-degradable as well as very cheap?
Quite true. Plastic Coke bottles are considerably more sturdy than bottles of spring water, presumably because the former also have to be pressure containment vessels.
But I buy only two brands of spring water and have been familiar for years with the flex and feel of those bottles, and I would stress that the point here is that those old bottles have changed, with the plastic becoming softer and more bag-like. I wish I had the means to chemically analyze the water for leached plastic substances. In fact I might keep a couple of those bottles and see if I can get some organization interested in doing just such an analysis.
In this case, the enclosed landing at the top of the basement stairs is almost entirely shielded from sunlight, so UV wouldn’t be a factor. It’s most likely plastic leaching into the water.
I use an under-sink reverse osmosis filtration system for my drinking water. I am sure that the quality of the water is much better than any bottled water, regardless of how recently it has been bottled. If I didn’t have the filtration system, I would still prefer tap water to bottled water. At least tap water is periodically tested for contaminants.
Back to the actual OP, yes, plastic water bottles leach chemicals into the water. (Bottled water also contains a lot of plastic nanoparticles, which is a different but also concerning issue.) Unfortunately, recycled plastic bottles leach more chemicals than new plastic, so if you prefer recycled plastic for its environmental benefits, it could be harming you more directly. It baffles me that many people who are adamant about avoiding injesting “chemicals” blithely drink from plastic water and beverage bottles. A friend flatly refuses to store leftover food in plastic because stuff may leach into the food in the day or two that it sits in the fridge, but she drinks several bottles of Diet Coke per day, which has been sitting in the plastic bottle for who knows how many weeks.
If you keep emergency drinking water is your vehicle- those brands which come in resealable aluminum bottles are best. For the radiator, plastic is okay.
My strong preference for bottled water isn’t based on some delusion that it’s safer or healthier. It’s based on the fact that it tastes good, like pure water should, whereas unfiltered tap water everywhere I’ve lived tastes like shit, probably because of the chlorine. And while tap water is supposed to be safe because it’s regularly tested, this is only true until it isn’t.
The tap water in Santa Barbara is horrendous tasting. I run all water that I consume through a Brita filter in a pitcher. Even though bottled water may come from the same source as tap water, it’s filtered. Chlorine is definitely part of what’s filtered out. You can easily check that with a test strip meant for testing the chlorine level in pools.
I should clarify that I’m in an area with numerous northern springs, and that “bottled water” here usually means real spring water. That fact is indicated on the label, along with an indication of its geographic origin and an analysis of the water’s mineral content.
I live a couple of blocks away from a creek and less than half a mile from there it exits into the Pacific. I wouldn’t dream of drinking that creek water and all of the crap that it’s picked up by the time it reaches me.
I wouldn’t, either. “Spring” in “spring water” doesn’t refer to a surface creek. Around here, at least, all the spring water sources I know of that bottled water comes from are underground springs in the northern Ontario wilderness.
In 1999, after a four-year review of the bottled-water industry and its safety standards, NRDC concluded that there is no assurance that bottled is cleaner or safer than tap water. In fact, an estimated 25 percent or more of water sold in a plastic bottle is really just tap water in a bottle—sometimes further treated, sometimes not.
Of the 1,000 bottles tested, the majority proved to be relatively clean and pure. About 22 percent of the brands tested contained chemicals at levels above state health limits in at least one sample. If consumed over a long period of time, some of those contaminants could cause cancer or other health problems for people with weakened immune systems.
and that was 2 decades ago also
But then there’s microplastics and other junk that leeches from the plastic.
Whats is this “freeze” you speak of? True- dont store them in the "freezer’, because that’s is the only way around here they might freeze. Not to mention, a plastic water bottle can also burst if there isnt enough air in there to allow expansion.
Around here they’d risk freezing in my car six or seven months of the year. Plastic bottles won’t break if frozen if there’s a bit of air space left. Metal ones are likely to unless there’s a lot of air space left.
I don’t buy bottled water, in any case, except for limited uses requiring distilled water. And I agree that plastic use should be avoided as much as possible.
True- dont store them in the "freezer’, because that’s is the only way around here they might freeze. Not to mention, a plastic water bottle can also burst if there isnt enough air in there to allow expansion.