Bottlemania - Elizabeth Royte [59]
I have to say, after my tap-water investigations, that I’m not immune to the appeal of springwater. The major brands come from reasonably protected sources, they contain no chlorination by-products, and they’re more or less a natural product—a far cry from big-city municipal water. Al Gore requested springwater—a regional brand, “not Evian”—when he toured with An Inconvenient Truth. (And when he went to the Academy Awards he drank Biota, the official water of the Oscars, which came in a bottle made from corn. The company, which drew water from springs in Ouray, Colorado, filed for bankruptcy shortly after its star turn: too much biota—plant and animal life—in the water.)
In a trance induced by the sounds of plashing water, I make my way to a cooler filled with company product. PLEASE DO NOT REFILL WATER BOTTLES reads a small sign. The spell is broken and, annoyed by Nestlé’s greediness, I top off my reusable from the spigot. Is it dangerous to refill a PET bottle? Or are the bottlers merely pushing us to buy more water? Refilling a PET bottle, I learn, is dangerous only if harmful bacteria have grown inside it. If you have the time and fortitude to wash your bottle with warm, soapy water (a bottle brush is handy), more power to you. Me, I’ll stick with my widemouthed Nalgene.
But not with complete confidence. Hard polycarbonate bottles, some with the resin code 7 on the bottom, seem like the ultimate reusable: easy to wash, hard to shatter. But polycarbonate is now known to leach tiny amounts of bisphenol A (BPA), a chemical that mimics estrogen. (The more scratched your bottle, and the hotter the liquid inside it, the more it leaches.) A study by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention found BPA in 95 percent of the people who were tested at levels at or above those that affected development in animals. Everyone, it seems, has had chronic, low-level exposure. BPA comes from those five-gallon water jugs used for home and office delivery, from baby bottles, the linings of food cans, dental sealants, and some wine vats, water mains, and tanks lined with epoxy resins.
According to more than a hundred government-funded studies, tiny amounts of BPA cause genetic changes that lead to prostate cancer, as well as decreased testosterone, low sperm counts, and signs of early female puberty in lab animals. The genetic mechanisms affected by these chemicals work similarly in all animals—including humans. A review conducted by the National Institutes of Health concluded BPA does pose some human health risks to fetuses and children, though they were mostly classified as minimal. The makers and users of BPA say the chemical poses no risk to humans, but their studies looked at high doses, not low (yes, it’s counterintuitive, but studies show tiny amounts have negative effects not always seen at higher levels). The IBWA isn’t concerned with bisphenol and doesn’t test for it.
A direct connection between BPA and human illness has yet to be proved. But Patricia Hunt, a molecular biologist at Case Western Reserve University who’s been studying the chemical for nearly a decade, says, “If we wait for comparable human data and it comes out like animal data, we aren’t going to be breeding as a species.”
And that’s enough for me. I toss my oldest Nalgenes and buy a couple of Sigg bottles, made of aluminum and lined with a water-based nontoxic polymer, so far unindicted by the chemical police. Here, finally, is a clear-cut step I can take to protect my family and myself from the modern world. I’m still not over the shock of learning what’s sometimes in tap water (even if it occurs at levels acceptable to the government), but at least it’s not growing