Exposed to extreme heat, plastic bottles may ultimately become unsafe !!

Before you reach for a plastic water bottle to keep hydrated, you might think twice about whether it too has been wilting under a hot sun. The hotter it gets, the more the stuff in plastic can move into food or drinking water.

Most plastic items release a tiny amount of chemicals into the beverages or food they contain. As temperature and time increase, the chemical bonds in the plastic increasingly break down and chemicals are more likely to leach.

Most of the water bottles you find on supermarket shelves are made of a plastic called polyethylene terephthalate, or PET. It’s recognizable by the recycling number one and accepted by most curbside recycling programs.

A hot car can reach temperatures over 150 degrees Fahrenheit in the summer. In experiments, it took 38 days for water bottles heated to that temperature in a lab to show levels of antimony that exceeded safety recommendations.

Water bottles that can be used repeatedly are most often made from high-density polyethylene (HDPE) or polycarbonate. HDPE is largely accepted by recycling programs but polycarbonate is more difficult to recycle.

To make those bottles hard and shiny, manufacturers often use bisphenol-A or BPA, a compound that has come under fire for its toxicity. BPA is an endocrine disrupter, which means it can disrupt normal hormone function and lead to a slew of dangerous health issues. Studies have linked the compound to breast cancer.

The FDA bans BPA from baby bottles and sippy cups, but has found no evidence to support additional restrictions.

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 BPA free’ does not necessarily mean ‘safe’.  Bisphenol-S is often used as an alternative even though it’s "structurally similar to BPA and turns out to have very similar properties.

 Fewer studies have been done on what happens to water when left in reusable water containers in high temperatures, but research done by pouring boiling water into polycarbonate indicated that more BPA leached out as a result.

The bottom line is that glass is better than plastic, wherever possible.