Storing water in a plastic bottle

Factual Questions
1

I keep plastic bottles of water in my car in case of emergency. Around three or four. Never been opened.

But my co-worker says that plastic… has a sort of chemical that’ll… contaminate the water after a long period of time, suddenly retracts that since that’s how we store water anyway, and then offers to say “Don’t store water in your car,” since it can get very hot inside the car.

The heat can have a pretty strong effect on my car, it being black and all. Does the heat affect the plastic in any way that could harm the water?

2

Google is your friend - try a search on ‘bisphenol A’ and you can read about the current controversy and hysterics with the water bottles.

As for heat affecting the bottles in your car, I don’t know. But the caps on most bottles are not always tight, and I would be more worried about a spill if they tipped-over.

3

If I’m dying in an emergency I’ll probably drink most anything. Who cares?

That being said, just change your water every 6 mos or so. Hope you don’t need it.

4

To paraphrase your questions a little:

  1. Can chemicals leach from plastic into water?

Yes. As snowthx mentioned, Bisphenol A is a recent example of a chemical that can leach from plastic into water. Here’s a link to a PDF of one of many studies conducted on BPA, showing some leaching.

  1. So don’t store water in your car because it’ll get hot?

Not entirely - BPA and other leachates aren’t present in all types of containers. If your car will get hot, store water in a glass, aluminum, or non-BPA plastic container. Not all plastics leach BPA, even at high temperatures. I would avoid storing water in your car in one of those thin plastic water bottles they sell in packs of 12 or 24 though. It’s a free country, so do it if you want to, but I don’t see the advantage.

  1. Does heat effect plastic in a way that could harm the water?

Sure - depending on the kind of plastic and the level of harm you want to be concerned about.

Since this water is stored in case of emergency, is there any reason it has to be in the plastic bottles? I store water for emergency in empty (cleaned with soap and water) used glass juice bottles - it’s a little heavier, sure, so you might want to use a different kind of plastic or a metal container.

5

In a life or death situation I’m not going to be worrying about potential carcinogens. (I’m assuming that’s the concern about the contaminant.) I’m not planning on making a steady diet of it.

6

Really guys!! What happened to fighting ignorance ?

Most bottled water is sold in PET (polyethylene terephthalate) bottles. BPA has nothing to do with this plastic.

PET has very low risks for keeping water in a hot car and a frozen freezer as evidenced by many studies. Here’s a link - http://www.napcor.com/PET/pet_faqs.html

There is no scientific basis to PET being unsafe. Now if you believe Facebook posts- that’s another matter.

7

Well, it’s emergency and casual use. Two water bottles in the trunk and one for the driver’s cup holder, which I don’t know if I’ll drink in two months or more. The most probably cause is either that a friend is thirsty or I’m in one of those long car rides.

It kinda has to be plastic since there’s that emergency event where the car might just roll around, you don’t want that flying.

My trunk has a cup holder on the side, so they don’t roll around.

I know it’s a hard guess, since it wouldn’t show any immediate effects… but I was planning on doing that for life until my co-worker brought up that point.

From what I’ve seen, the water bottles don’t show whether they’re PET or BPA.

8

There usually is a marking in the bottom of the bottle - and here is the key to tell what those numbers mean : http://www.dec.ny.gov/docs/materials_minerals_pdf/plasticpam.pdf

9

Essentially invariably, standard soda bottles are PET. Hard plastic bottles may be BPA but they are unusual.

10

Yes, but here’s a related question. What about the products that are produced with post-consumer recycled plastic? Those markings determine the recycling attributes of different plastic containers. But how many people pay attention to them when they recycle, and how can recycling centers sort them?

So again, what about the stuff made with the recycled product? Like my favorite local brand of bottled water, which claims the bottles to be made from recycled plastic and doesn’t have any markings on the bottle, no doubt because the plastic is a mongrel blend of many plastics of unknown origin. And I recycle them, too, and so the original plastic gets ever more mongrelized as times goes on!

11

That would probably be more useful if it identified which bottles were made with BPA, but it doesn’t.
Plastic #1 - Polyethelyene terephlthalate - PET, which do not contain BPA. They are generally ribbed and therefore hard to clean, so due to the reservoirs of bacterial growth that may survive behind the ridges that are difficult to rinse, they shouldn’t be re-used. If you store your emergency water in them, dump them after 6 months - don’t refill. Leaching of Antimony from PET bottles is very low and unlikely to cause health effects.
Plastic #2 - High Density Polyethelyene - HDPE, which doesn’t contain BPA. Generally thought of as safe for food and beverages.
Plastic #3 - Polyvinyl Chloride - PVC, which may or may not contain BPA depending on the formulation. I don’t know much about the use of PVC in food/beverage containers, but neonatal patients exposed to PVC medical tubing showed high concentrations of leached Di(2-ethylhexyl) phthalate - DEHP - which is harmful to the liver and kidney, and is a possible carcinogen, (Medical equipment with DEHP is contraindicated with young males before puberty and pregnant women) and high concentrations of BPA - BPA is an endocrine disruptor which binds to receptors that would normally bind to estrogen. As a result, BPA is of concern for neurological and behavioral defects in fetuses and young people. That said, it’s not clear how much exposure can be associated with use as a beverage container.
Plastic #4 - Low Density Polyethylene - LDPE, which doesn’t contain BPA as far as I know. Should be OK, but hard to find as a beverage container, mostly it’s those squeeze bottles.
Plastic #5 - Polypropylene - PP, doesn’t contain BPA, should be safe.
Plastic #6 - Polystyrene - PS, doesn’t contain BPA, however, it does leach styrene, especially into hot beverages or alcoholic beverages in PS containers. Styrene may be a gastrointestinal and kidney toxin, and is a possible carcinogen. Not a good long-term storage choice for emergency water storage anyway because PS doesn’t hold up to temperature well - think one of those thin yogurt containers. This probably wasn’t what you’re keeping emergency water in, but I wouldn’t choose it for that purpose.
Plastic #7 - “Other” - includes Polycarbonate - PC - plastics, which are the ones that made the news several years ago for leaching BPA into water stored in them. BPA is not considered a carcinogen, although research is ongoing into conceivable links to cancer. BPA is definitely an endocrine disruptor, though, and dangerous developmentally to young people and fetuses - neurological development and behavior are the most likely detrimental effects of exposure.

In summary - Plastics #2, 4, and 5 should be fine for the purpose of keeping emergency water, and so should metal and glass.
Even people exposed to plastics #3, 6, and 7 shouldn’t really worry about it. Everyone hopefully knows that most toxins are highly dependent on dose, and the average person probably doesn’t get exposed to nearly enough BPA, DEHP, or Styrene to worry about it - most of these are worries because of their developmental effects, not because they will cause adverse effects in adults. You’d have to consistently heat up and drink from these containers a lot and do that your whole life to reach the levels of BPA, DEHP, or Styrene that we’d know you’d have ill effects.

The appropriate response is not to freak out in any way, but just to choose from alternatives like plastics #1, 2, 4, and 5, or glass or metal for any long-term storage or applications that involve heating, and over a longer time scale things like baby bottles and medical equipment for the young, who are the ones who really have to worry about this kind of exposure (although honestly, a baby doesn’t know what BPA is so it’s not doing any worrying anyway - really people like baby bottle manufacturers and hospital administrators have to do the worrying for it, thank goodness.)

Thanks for your clarification on PET bottles, am77494, it was very helpful.

12

More than a little optimistic I’m afraid.

13

They actually have to sort the plastics pretty well before recycling them, that’s what the markings are for - most plastics actually don’t “mix”, like oil and water. Still, the recycling degrades the plastic, much like how recycling paper breaks the fibres and degrades the quality. See downcycling.

Glad to know it’s kind of safe, I plan to be leaving emergency water bottles in my car too.

14

If you had a line of 365 plastic jugs, and every day you drank the oldest one and refilled it and put it at the back of the line, there is a slight possibility that over a lifetime you might accumulate enough of some chemical that it would be detectable in an autopsy following your death by natural causes… But if you drank from a jug of year-old water on a camping trip once a year, the trace of chemical in it would be no more significance than every-day background exposure, comparable to what you might get from any other plastic-packaged product.

Cite: Common sense.

15

In other words, “ignore everything above this line”.