Bottlemania - Elizabeth Royte [58]
Sometimes, when testers take a close look at bottled water that may be up to two years old, they find contaminants that got an ND (for “not detected” at or above the minimum reporting level) when the company ran its own analyses. These contaminants have nothing to do with the water itself: they come from its plastic packaging.
Most water bottles are made from polyethylene terephthalate (PET), a polymer derived from oil, with other ingredients added for flexibility, color, and strength. I keep hearing about a softening agent, called phthalates, used to make some plastics flexible. I keep hearing, also, that they’re known to disrupt the endocrine system, ever so important in growth and development. In 2005, the European Union banned the use of six different phthalates in toys and child-care articles; in 2007, California followed suit. Neither PET nor bottle caps made of polypropylene contain phthalates, but those cloudy white water jugs made of high-density polyethylene (HDPE)—the big ones with the built-in spigot and the one-gallon jugs—do. The EPA regulates phthalates in tap water, but the FDA, lobbied by the bottled-water industry, refused to do so until the late nineties. The IBWA’s phthalate limits match the EPA’s, though it measures levels at the plant, not in water that has been stored for months or even years.
What about those other ingredients in plastic bottles? In 2006, William Shotyk, a geochemist at the University of Heidelberg, found antimony, used as a catalyst in the manufacture of PET, leaching into bottled water. Ingested in small doses antimony can cause dizziness and depression; in large doses, nausea, vomiting, and death. The amounts Shotyk detected were well below government standards, but they kept rising the longer water stayed in PET containers. Samples opened immediately after bottling had 160 parts per trillion (the U.S. allows 6 parts per billion, equivalent to 6,000 parts per trillion, in tap water). After three months, the antimony level doubled, and after another three months it nearly doubled again. Still, it was well below federal limits.
And the effects of extreme temperatures on water bottles? An Internet rumor warns that freezing releases scary chemicals, such as dioxin, into your water. False: if anything, cooling slows down the migration of chemicals. Besides, PET doesn’t contain dioxin—the carcinogen is generated only at temperatures above seven hundred degrees, a temperature the interior of your car is unlikely to reach, even with the windows rolled up in Death Valley in August.
The FDA insists PET plastic is safe for food products, under normal conditions (don’t microwave it). But the agency stops short of saying chemicals don’t leach into food and water. Instead, it says levels of chemical migration from PET bottles are “well within the margin of safety based on information available to the agency.” It isn’t a ringing endorsement, especially since manufacturers themselves supply the information to the FDA, and science continues to find evidence that chemicals can have negative health effects at levels well below those approved for everyday use.
After leaving the Hollis plant I drive up to the Poland Spring museum, in the company’s Preservation Park, in Poland. Alone in the original bottling plant, now renovated as a stately visitors’ center, I wander past science displays and Poland Spring memorabilia. Inside a diorama, a mannequin in a lab coat—with his thick, dark wig, push-broom mustache, and wire-rimmed glasses, he resembles George Harrison—gazes soulfully at nineteenth-century water-testing equipment. Contemplating him, I try to imagine what it was like in the pre-chlorination