Get your BPA FREE with each new bottle!

Roughly a year ago one of the first studies showing that BPA, the known estrognic plastic used to make polycarbonate bottles, leached into liquids under extreme conditions of heating and rigorous washing was published to much fanfare. The study raised a serious issue, although it seemed that unless you were routinely heating your liquids in a well washed bottle (huh? wash my water bottle? In the dishwater?) – a problem clearly relevant to new parents, but not so to folks like me who were done reproducing – ridding the household of all polycarbonate wasn’t a high priority. While I did replace the kid's bottles with the now suspect PET bottles (more on that one later) the old polycarbs still went to the tennis courts and up Mount Toby with me. I just couldn’t justify adding more plastic so the recycle or waste cycle so as long as I had it, I used it. Same with the gem-colored polycarb juice glasses we’ve used for years.

Well, as usual with chemicals we’re just getting to know more intimately than we’d like, there's always one more study that makes us wonder if "we've" really done our best when it comes to using chemicals wisely. This time it's a new study published in Environmental Health Perspectives by researchers at the Harvard School of Public Health which reports that BPA molecules really don’t need all that much coaxing to be released from bottle to water. In fact, just regular use, filling them up with cold liquids and drinking was enough to raise concentrations of BPA in the urine of polycarb bottle using Harvard students.

After one week of drinking all their cold beverages from Nalgene Lexan bottles (could you fill this bottle rather than that beer stein please?), and peeing into a cup during the designated hours of 5-8PM, students increased their pre-polycarb urine concentrations by 69%. In other words – you get a little BPA with your water even if you don’t heat it up and abuse the bottle.

Given that the very young (newborns and infants) tend to retain their BPA a bit longer (because their metabolic system which clears chemicals like BPA is less active than adults) this study, one of the first to show that normal use of polycarb means exposure to BPA, should give pause to any parent still using the old polycarb baby bottles. It’s certainly enough to push me to take those pretty gem-colored juice glasses and relegate them to the craft cabinet.