What's a girl to do to get a good light weight water bottle!?  Behold the evil little 7 on the bottom of my water bottle! humbug!

There is nothing at all the matter with that model water-drinker's figure, is there.

So no canned tomatoes either? I can live without plastic water bottles and canned foods except canned tomatoes and canned red curry paste. Good lord.

I decided to get some stainless steel water bottles for each member of my household a couple months ago, after reading about this for a while. The bottle still has a plastic cap but it is durable and washable.  I was having trouble getting another bottle clean after a while and thought the metal would be better for that purpose also.

As with most other chemicals, the presence of heat (hot liquids, or heated cans) would be likely to release more of the offensive BPA from the plastic into the container's food contents.  This article is the first one I've seen to link BPA to canned food liners.  I understand that canned food is packaged under heat (pasteurization) and that makes me concerned about leaching of the BPA into the food, be it canned fruit or canned tomatoes or soup concentrate (to name a few in my own pantry).

Thanks Umbra. Must seek out frozen foods and invest in better labeling/organizing system for my  basement chest freezer.

I agree veggies are better fresh or frozen. But there are staple pantry items that are affected by this that you can't get frozen and some you can't get fresh without significantly increasing costs and/or time. Thinking coconut milk, anchovies, canned tomatoes, curry pastes, canned legumes, etc. Given the economy and the already almost elitist issues with local and organic food it's rather cavalier to just say - let them eat fresh or let them eat frozen. Organic food purchases are already dropping precipitously as gas prices go up. If we really want to convert other people to wanting to do what's best for the planet and even our own health the assumption that people aren't living from paycheck to 4 days before the next paycheck is going  to have to go.

Questions for My Environmental Friends (In the
Interests of Coming to a Mutual "Meeting of
Minds"):

1) How do we keep several hundred million poor on
this planet from starving, and yet keep taking
more crop land for biofuels or environmental
preserves?

2) Can we stop climate change, using strictly
renewables, without nuclear?  I.E. I would like
to see numbers on crop land acreage taken out for
solar, wind, etc., & how is this numerically
feasible, without messing up our planetary
food supplies.

3) You seem to have strong concerns on nuclear
safety.  What are your feelings on the South
African pebble bed modular nuclear reactors
(PBMNR), which are allegedly passively safe?
(I am aware, on the PBMNR, of the concern about
accidental burning of the pebbles, due to acci-
dental exposure to air.  This is being worked on,
by R & D on oxide ceramic coated pebbles, such
as magnesium oxide).

4) Have you folks considered nuclear waste dis-
posal in space, or into the sun, via the
Slingatron hypervelocity ground to space launcher?

5) Have you considered putting nuclear reactors
in large diameter earth orbit, beaming power
down to earth via microwave, and associated
space waste disposal?  This supports putting
industry in space, outside our biosphere, and
addresses mineral extraction from the minerally
rich asteroids, to avoid mineral depletion of
earth resources.  These mineral resources are
a million-fold as large as all of the mineral
resources of earth.

6) Have you considered uranium / plutonium cycle,
recycling, to extend uranium fuel supplies to
several hundred years, and associated nuclear
proliferation concerns?  This is currently
illegal in the US (Jimmy Carter), but the
French have offered to recycle our fuel for free.

7) Have you considered uranium / thorium breeders,
with resultant 600 - 2000 year world energy
supplies at 10 times current generation rates?

8) Have you considered the proliferation issues,
of every country in the Middle East currently
building, or planning to build, nuclear reactors
either for energy production, or optimized for
plutonium production, as in the case of Iran?

9) Have you considered the rapidly developing
technology of accelerator - driven sub-critical
micro (house supply) or mini (small industrial
facility) uranium or thorium nuclear reactors,
which can be currently built by any individual
or small group, without access to "critical
nuclear materials"?  Turn off the accelerator,
& presto, the reactor shuts down in milli-
seconds.

10) Have you considered accelerator - driven
systems, for 'burning up' long-lived actinides
& fission debris, into short-lived radioactives
or stable isotopes?

I.E nuclear technology is in its earliest
infancy...

Regards, Art Collins, Retired Nuclear &
Aerospace Engineer

The old school Nalgene bottles (cloudy white plastic) that have been used for years in chemistry labs around the world are made of #2 HDPE plastic.  They are not as easy to keep clean and not quite as durable, but no BPA and you still have that classic Nalgene design.  

A good authority (a scientist who studies BPA) told me that it is also used in the lining of soda cans.  Does anybody know if this is true?  I don't drink soda anyway, but thought it would be interesting to know.

I have read all of Umbra's articles on BPAs... but this article goes even further and now I am totally at a loss.  If I can't use plastic food containers, what in the heck am I supposed to take my home-made organic lunch foods to work & school in?  I have tried glass containers and wound up with with a 25 lb lunch bag.  I can use glass containers at home, but as a full-time employee and full-time student who has to cart 3 meals worth of food around with her all day - what the heck am I supposed to use???  

"In laboratory animals, low-dose exposure to BPA has been linked to cancer, diabetes, fertility problems, and behavior disorders."

Why do we continue testing on animals when we don't pay attention to the test results?!

Since when do corporations do right just because of public outcry? Nothing wrong with plastic, eh?