by Jack Lee
Are you inadvertantly poisoning yourself? A lot of people like to carry bottled water around in cars just for the convenience, but it’s probably not a good idea. Research has shown that often times plastic water bottles left in cars get hot. The heat causes chemicals to leach from the plastic into your drinking water! Polyethylene terephthalate is found in most grade 1 plastics and the grade 1 plastic is used in making most bottles destined for drinking water.
If you reuse these water bottles washing scratches the surfaces and in some cases the bottles are bent and wrinkle and this allows further degrading of the plastic and the release of a trace metal called antimony.
“We have to assume that along with that metal, others are almost certainly leaching out as well, but we dont know what they are and we dont know what to look for because manufacturers wont tell us what else is in the bottles, Biology Professor vom Saal of the University of Missouri said.
Lynn R. Goldman, professor of environmental health at the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health, said the truth was that it leached in barely discernible amounts. Perhaps more worrisome is that because the bottles with their small openings are harder to wash out than the wide-mouth hiking and sports bottles, they can house bacteria.