April 29th, 2009

The Last Straw for Bottled Water?

by Jessica Jensen

We certainly hope so! We’ve written before about the horrible environmental impact of bottled water– and now we’re glad to see that new health evidence may further help people decide to chuck their bottled water habits.

Did you know that Americans send over 35 billion water bottles a year to landfills? And it takes about 1.5 million barrels of oil to make those bottles, so it is an environmental double whammy. (By the way that’s enough oil to fuel 100,000 cars for a year!)

Now on to the health bit. New research coming out of Germany shows that PET plastics (the clear plastic most often used to make water bottles) may also harbor hormone-disrupting chemicals that leach into the water. According to Discovery News, it seems that some as-yet unidentified chemicals in these plastics can interfere with estrogen and other reproductive hormones, just as the infamous plasticizers BPAand phthalates do. Read the full article here.

Make the switch! Tap water is where it’s at! And get a stainless steel bottle to take it with you.

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