Don’t use or reuse that bottle
Shortly before we left on vacation last year, I decided to make an impulse purchase of a small water carrying bottle. A brand name bottle, made by a company that has provided laboratories with a whole line of flasks, jugs, etc. Experts in their field, not just a third-world knockoff firm. Safety for the discerning camper.
A water bottle is practical during the hottest days of summer and throughout the long colder stretch of winter. I began to enjoy that 500 ml of filtered beverage on the city bus, stuck in traffic. This was one of my better purchases, and I was “being healthy” with the oldest refreshment known to man. I even started freezing the bottle of water during the day, just to be sure that my trip home would have something cool and wet available.
Somebody tried to warn me; they’d read in a runners’ journal that water bottles could leach dangerous chemicals. I Googled, I analysed, I scoffed at the potential for bodily harm. When the first couple of stores began removing (voluntarily) the lines of plastic bottles cited from their sales racks, my own feeling was that this was a hysterical reaction. How could a company that manufactured laboratory equipment and baby formula bottles be wrong?
Well, today the officials at Health Canada brought down the results of their testing; products containing biphenol A are too dangerous to be left in the hands of babies. No more juice cups. No more bottles that were safe enough to be thrown at the head of an unwary parent who came too close to the crib of an aspiring grenadier. Henceforth, the risk of a “hormone mimic” chemical is too great for those of us with a trekking bottle to continue.
Worse, we can’t even recycle the product. The symbol 
no longer means what we think. Instead, we’re back to square one with a whole line of useless plastics that can’t be burned, crushed, buried or traded in for valuable pennies at the bottle depot. In fact, the use of biphenol-A may be quite widespread, including the food cans that contain the average Canadian’s daily ration of fruits and vegetables.
No wonder we’re such an angst-ridden society.
