The Washington Post printed an article today (1-13-15) entitled, “BPA alternative disrupts normal brain-cell growth, is tied to hyperactivity, study says”.
Just wanted to share some thoughts on the article and how it may be interpreted. The article is referring to a study that was evaluating the risks of Bisphenol-S (BPS – an organic compound that is being substituted by some companies for Bisphenol-A (or BPA).
What was interesting was that a co-worker read the article and mistakenly thought that somehow DrinkMore’s BPA-free bottles might contain BPS. Let’s address that first and be very clear – NONE of our bottles contain either BPA or BPS!!! Our BPA-free bottles are made from PET – which is short for polyethylene terapthalate (yep, that’s a mouthful!). PET bottles have a #1 recycling symbol on them. Again, no BPA and no BPS.
Now here’s the real story. Historically, many bottles have been made from a plastic called polycarbonate. One of the constituents of polycarbonate is Bisphenol A (BPA). Polycarbonate has been used to make a whole assortment of water and drink bottles – mostly in the re-usable category. So, those 1-liter or 1-quart bottles that are pretty popular – they used to be made from polycarbonate. But as people became more concerned about the possible effects of BPA, companies began looking at alternatives. At DrinkMore, we made the decision to no longer use polycarbonate bottles (we went BPA-free!!). It cost a lot of money to change out all our 5-gallon bottles but we did it for our customers. We literally replaced every polycarbonate bottle with bottles made from PET.
Interestingly, many people don’t realize that polycarbonate bottles are made using a different process than PET bottles. Polycarbonate bottles are made via an extrusion process whereas PET bottles are blow molded. DrinkMore doesn’t make either kind of bottle – we buy them from manufacturers. Now, just for a minute, imagine that you are a polycarbonate bottle manufacturer and your customers no longer want polycarbonate made with BPA – they want some kind of BPA-free material. But the manufacturer has millions of dollars of extrusion equipment and doesn’t have any blow-molding equipment. That company is going to look for something, some material, something without BPA that can be extruded into a bottle. Can’t use PET – that has to be blow-molded. So they started substituting BPS instead of BPA and voila! they have a fancy new BPA-free bottle.
Kinda interesting huh? At DrinkMore, we only use PET for our bottles. No BPA. No BPS. No BPZ or X or F.
