Plastic Bottles and Containers

This probably won't happen often, but I'm going to post more than once today. As I'm sitting here at my desk drinking from my new Nalgene HDPE water bottle, I can't help but want to write about my recent discoveries in water and plastic. Both of these topics can go pretty deep. I'm just going to scratch the surface and summarize what I learned and what I did as a result.

Some people drink tap water here in Los Angeles. For me, it upsets my stomach if I drink too much of it (like at certain restaurants). Maybe it's because I grew up in Hawaii. Tap water doesn't seem to have an adverse effect on my insides over there. Anyway, we've been using a faucet mounted water filter from my mom for the past year and a half or so. It recently became unusable due to excessive leaking and I started buying bottled water by the gallon at the grocery store (I was buying six gallons at a time). Not only was this a hassle, but many people are against buying bottled water because of the amount of plastic waste created and there are debates over whether or not bottled water is any better than tap water (this also depends on the bottled water brand). However, my wife, Alice, was pregnant and tap water was not a consideration.

Due to slight concerns about drinking too many minerals in spring water, I wanted to buy distilled drinking water. (Pregnant women are supposed to drink a lot of water.) This limited the selection to choose from. After a few weeks of buying water jugs at the store, I wanted to get that water filter at home fixed. Meanwhile, to hold us off, I wanted to buy some containers to store the water that I could get from the leaky faucet filter. Since it leaked so badly, my plan was to detach the filter and only re-attach it while filling the containers. This led me to research water containers.

I felt we would probably go with some type of plastic container for it's weight, price and shatter resistance (if dropped). What I found was that most of those clear, colorful, hard plastic bottles leach a chemical called BPA when the plastic is heated, worn or cracked. BPA has been found to cause serious health problems in animals. Some argue that it's safe for humans. Regardless, we're not using #7 (polycarbonate) plastic any longer. I ended up buying a few #2 (HDPE) bottles from REI. I also tossed the sample baby bottle that we had, which was made from #7 plastic. The baby bottles we have now are #5 (PP) plastic.

Then I finally got around to calling the water filter vendor about the leak. They're mailing us $10. So, I went out and bought a replacement yesterday. Same brand, different model. And now I feel much better about our drinking water situation.