by B.J. on 9/23/2003 08:43:00 AM 0 comments Print this post

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Re-filling Water Bottles = Toxic ?

Hey today, I talked about "filtering out" and now I'm talking about toxic water. I think it's been a trend !

Ahem.

Anyway,

My Trader Joe's water bottle discreetly wrote, "DO NOT REFILL" on the outside of its plastic water bottle. I wondered for a second exactly why re-filling the plastic water would be harmful before I did yet another google search and scooped up this site and this site.

The first article centers its article on one experiment that saw 50% of its re-used samples become non-potable with 9% having fecal material. The second article briefly hints that bacteria is the cause of this non-potability and tells us how plastic water bottles are not meant to be used over and over.

And Trader Joe's is a store I generally trust. It claims to do good business and be consumer-based.

Some scary shit.

Daniel rebuked their argument saying that their claims were only after the water bottles were left somewhere after a long time. From my Aquatic Toxicology class, I not only learned that pollution in water is um. . .bad, but also that this pollution did not always mean bad and immediate action.

While there might be truth to those articles, the risk of drinking the re-filled plastic water bottle needs to be taken into context, the bigger picture. People in general are freaked out more by the little germs than by big and brash snowboarding which has more of a chance to hurt you.

So in context, with so many water choices in the supermarket, there would be no reason to select Trader Joe's water. And plain and simple they're still a business. Trader Joe's could be busting a little scare tactic on your ass and you wouldn't know.

So those are the two sides of the story, and the question still remains:

Is Trader Joe's protecting the consumer or scaring them into business ?

(Me ? To be on the safe side, I just got my re-useable rubbermaid water bottle at Long's Drug Store, but I would not hesitate to re-use my water bottle if I really needed)

 



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