A friend of mine recently expressed real concern about my long-term use of sport/bike/nalgene water bottles. If you’re not familiar with the term: Wiki bisphenol A entry.
A less neutral assessment of the plastic: Our Stolen Future.
I told her I had no concerns about BA. Hell, I’ve been drinking out of those bottles for more than 30 years. Should I be worried? Are you?
No.
I could have sworn we had a previous thread about this in GQ, but couldn’t find it.
Me? I don’t worry about it.
Yeah, I think it was my thread, and I got shouted down very quickly.
Well, if you drink just cold water from them, and you don’t let it sit too long (say days or weeks) you should be just fine.
We live in a world where people worry that a part per million is gonna kill them. Sure some things are toxic in that dilution, but very few.
Now if you were drinking acidic liquids (pop, lemonade or some such, then it becomes an issue, especially if you let it sit for a while.
My drinking water, that I pour into the bottle has trace, minute trace amounts of arsenic, lead, pesticides and other junk in it. It tastes OK, makes good coffee, and is cleaner/purer than much of the water available in other cities, let alone 3rd world countries. If I drink more than 15 gfallons of it in a day, It might make me sick (silly grin).
What gets me is that people are still drinking water from companies like aquafina and others who supply single use water bottles. The down stream and up stream effects of the industrial processes that produce these products are gonna have far greater toxic effects on my enviroment (both locally and globally) than me using a reusable bisphenol A type bottle correctly (Fresh water , changed regualarly)
So… I don’t worry… I don’t pay extra for organic veggies either…
Regards
FML
^^^What he said. It doesn’t concern me at all.
I don’t worry about it for myself. I did err on the side of caution and went with glass bottles for my baby, though (this was before the BPA baby bottles were pulled from the shelves of most retailers.)
I’d guess that most people have more exposure to BPA from canned goods than from the use of plastic water bottles. Most “tin” cans are lined with plastic containing BPA, and canning also usually involves high temperatures (which causes more BPA to leach out of the plastic).
Ah, thought I remembered that. You gots a linky?
Nope. I drink from one every day. Sometimes I put non-water stuff in it (water with lemon, soda, fruit juice, iced tea), which apparently increases the risk of OMGCancer!
If nothing else, I figure that I frequently engage in far more high-risk activities. The remote chance that my water bottle may be leeching chemicals into my beverage, and those chemicals may over time accumulate within me to levels that may increase my risks of cancer is pretty much nothing.
Well I figure since the baby bottles were banned in Canada, and major retailers here aren’t selling the Nalgene plastic water bottles anymore, that there must be something to it.
So I’ve changed SOME habits, although I still drink water out of the water cooler (apparently those big bottles have BPAs too). Our family switched from Nalgene water bottles to metal ones, and I give my little girl tap water instead of bottled water.
I worry enough that I changed my habits as well. The reports I read said that you can look at the bottom of the plastic container (not just water bottles) and the number inside the recycle triangle indicated what type of plastics are safe. 2, 4 and 5 are fine, the other numbers, not so much. Whether that is true or not, I did go ahead and pull the rubbermaid/tupperware kitchen items from my cabinets (only a handful) and put them aside for use when painting or gardening. I am more concerned with reheating food in them. Same for water bottles. If I use a water bottle, its only a couple of times and then I toss it into the recycle bin.
Glad I’m not the only one taking it seriously. 
I forgot to add that I also try to avoid reheating in plastic whenever possible, and I will NOT do it for my daughter’s food.
The only thing to it is ass covering due to junk science.
I am completely and totally unconcerned. I will continue to drink from my Nalgene bottle. I use it only for tap water and water never sits in it for long.
Even if this weren’t the case, I don’t think I would be worried. There are so many health scares popping up on the news these days that I’ve stopped taking any but the most dire seriously. I’m not going to hide in a lead lined bunker avoiding cell phones, microwaves and flip-flops and I’m certainly not giving up my water bottle.
I’m so not worried about it that this is the first time I’ve ever actually been interested enough to see what the kerfuffle was about.
Or a concern that bottlefed infants, who are the most vulnerable to hormonal changes and take ALL of their food from polycarbonate bottles, might be better off with bottles that don’t use BPA. The change may take a bit of time to implement, but it is ultimately just a matter of choosing a different plastic.
Maybe it’s no big deal for an adult to drink from a polycarbonate bottle, I don’t think about it much for myself. For my (soon to arrive) son, I’ll choose a glass or polypropylene bottle, all it takes is choosing this model instead of that model, and I can put that much effort into it for now, even if the science isn’t all that solid.
This right here.
I am paying attention to the BPA stuff, and I’m trying to get as much “bad plastic” out of our house as possible. We’ve switched to BPA-free water bottles, and our son uses BPA-free bottles, too. We don’t use our plastic travel coffee mugs anymore, and I buy BPA-free baby bowls/spoons/etc. I’m more careful about stuff that the baby uses, since BPA is supposed to be especially bad for baby boys, but I try to keep an eye on the products that I use, too, since we hope to have another baby in a couple-three years.
Do I stay up at night, worrying about it? No. But it doesn’t take a whole lot of effort, and since we don’t know exactly what the long-term effects are, I would rather err on the side of caution.
Also, there is relatively new research out that says that once your polycarbonate water bottle has been exposed to boiling water, it will leach more BPA into even room-temperature water: cite .
The trouble with BPA is not that it’s carcinogenic, it’s that it’s an endocrine disruptor. We study endocrine disruptors in our lab (BPA among them), and I can promise you, it’s not “junk science”, nor are the papers that have been pulished on it (look at pubmed.com). Some EDCs work at freakishly low (femtomolar) concentrations. Unfortunatelyl I don’t have exact data for BPA, as I’m not the person working on it.
Knowing all this, my personal stage of worry is: I don’t use my Nalgene’s to store liquids anymore, but I still use them for dry goods (rice, cereal, whatever). This is probably foolish of me, but hell, I’m already making estrogen, so a little more probably won’t hurt. When I have kids? No BPA for them.