Get rid of your Nalgene bottles

If you haven't already, get rid of all your Nalgene Bottles. You know the popular clear hard plastic bottles that seemingly EVERYONE has and carries around with them. These plastics contain what is being described as a very harmful ingredient called Bisphenol A (BPA). I read an article about this several months ago in the Green Guide, and at the time it was becoming a hot issue, with cities like San Francisco banning it. Also, at the time, the people at Nalgene were defending their product and playing the there is not enough evidence to say our products are unsafe card. I recall going to their webpage at the time that I read this and they even had a special link to their own information on BPA, claiming their products were safe and all studies to that point where inconclusive.

Well, now that Canada is planning a ban, and the National Institute of Health is saying it is toxic, they are phasing it out over the next few months and offering many non-BPA alternatives. It would seem to me that they saw these bans coming a while ago.. They did offer some alternatives before, but they were not marketed nearly as much as the Polycarbonate bottles that everyone knows so well. That may just be the cynic in me, but if they DID see this coming and planned accordingly, how on earth do they explain the continued sale of a product that they knew would be classified as unsafe in the near future?

There is also a huge buzz going about where they are using these plastics in baby bottles. The green guide has also hit on this as well (in 1999!!), but it is back in the news because of these most recent studies. How is this for a response from a plastic company representative, "There is nothing new in this report," said Steven Hentges, executive director of the American Plastics Council's Polycarbonate Business Unit. "The data that is presented has been known for years and, most importantly, data of that type has been reviewed by government agencies around the world in their comprehensive reviews on BPA and, in every case, they reach a conclusion even after considering this kind of data that polycarbonate baby bottles are safe for use."

Basically there is no ban yet, but many producers admit they are BPA is unsafe, but they downgrade the amounts that are leached and they plan to keep selling them anyway. I personally really wish we would remove the phrase "safe level" from our vocabulary. If we know something is unsafe... why have ANY of it?