Slurps of joy

Nalgene dumps estrogenic ingredient

Posted by Fawn Pattison (Guest Contributor) at 3:31 PM on 18 Apr 2008

Read more about: green living | toxics | health | food

Have you been fretting over the reports of gender-bending pollutants leaching from reusable water bottles? Finally, some good news: Nalgene is dumping polycarbonate plastic, according to a report in The New York Times today.

Nalgene made its decision in response to Health Canada's announcement earlier this week that it would list bisphenol A as a toxicant. BPA is the estrogenic plastic additive that makes polycarbonate a dubious choice for food and beverage containers. Grist reported earlier this week that the National Institutes of Health is also expressing increased concern about the chemical, which has been at the center of a battle over industry influence over consumer safety standards.

Next stop on the BPA express: Wal-Mart says it will be dumping BPA from baby bottles later this year. The chemical is still widely used in baby bottles, the linings of steel cans used for canned food, water coolers, compact discs, and plenty of other consumer products.

At least the campers can gulp freely.

For story: Slurps of joy
6 Comments | Post a Comment

Even WAL-MART is in on it...

...they plan to ban BPA plastic bottles (for babies, at least), by 2009.

Toys-R-Us and Target are reported to be doin' the same.

That still leaves the other BPA products for adults however...

by Tasermons Partner at 3:38 PM on 18 Apr 2008

Get a steel bottle

Here in Ecotopia we all wander around with pricey stainless steel water bottles. I'm sure aluminum would work just as well as long as you only put water in it and nothing acidic that might leach the aluminum.

They even have baby bottle sized steel bottles fwiw.

Put the Carbon Back

by Pangolin at 4:08 PM on 18 Apr 2008

BPA

Now what I want to know if whether or not Nalgene is going to stop using polycarbonate for animal water bottles. You see, pretty much all of the animals used in all scientific studies that involve captive animals, spend their entire lives drinking out of a polycarbonate bottle made by Nalgene. So basically all animal research conducted in the last several decades has been done on populations that have spent their entire lives consuming low levels of hormone disruptors. This is not good.

by GreenEngineer at 7:08 PM on 18 Apr 2008

BPA free since 2003

Back in fall 2003, 6 mos. after we launched our site Reusablebags.com designed to raise awareness of the plastic bag problem, we decided to offer reusable bottles - during our research we came across disturbing info on polycarbonate bottles. The decision was easy to NOT offer them and to help raise awareness of the growing concerns, mounting evidence and the fact that safe alternatives do exist The most disturbing thing is the fact that baby bottles have been sold for so long with these concerns widely known. Shame on these companies!

Dedicated to serving the 3x bottom line.

by Vcobb at 8:12 PM on 20 Apr 2008

Hooray!

It's been a long time coming, but I'm glad Nalgene has finally decided to discontinue BPA. If you'd like more background on this issue, read these blog posts.

http://www.ncconservationnetwork.org/mainblog

by mindy at 10:14 AM on 25 Apr 2008

BPA in animal testing

It's an interesting point but a few factors suggest to me that this is not a concern:

The majority of large labs switched over to automatic drip watering systems (water delivered through a metal tube with a ball bearing that the animal licks to drink from) sometime in the early to mid 90's. Smaller labs may still use polycarb water bottles, and I don't know about government labs (although I suspect that if they are large, they have gone "automatic" as well - it's cheaper in the long run).
Every animal study has a control group; therefore, any changes that were caused by BPA leaching into animal drinking water would be observed in both control and drug-treated groups, leading to a conclusion of a "natural" background phenonmenon. While this doesn't do much for understanding the natural biology of laboratory animals, it does not really impact the safety assessment of new drugs.
Most of the water bottles that I remember from my lab days were not hard polycarbonate (like Nalgene bottles) but softer, milky, slightly flexible plastic - perhaps HDPE?
It's unclear how much BPA would be leached from bottles that were emptied/filled every day and were routinely (at least once/week) washed through an industrial cage wash system.

by kmp at 10:35 AM on 25 Apr 2008

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