Geary, Your e-mail is most enlightening but the question of your subject remains. Nalgene bottles toxic? In the grand scheme of things is there enough toxic leaching from these water bottles and other forms of plastic containers to do any harm to a frequent user who has normal anti-bodies in their makeup? We would all appreciate your following up on your last sentence (in your spare time). Fritz
-----Original Message----- From: Geary Schindel [mailto:gschin...@edwardsaquifer.org] Sent: Wednesday, April 04, 2007 1:47 PM To: eda...@realtime.net; Cavers,Texas Subject: RE: [Texascavers] Nalgene bottles toxic? Back when I worked on Superfund projects and we were doing lots of analyses for VOC's (volatile organic compounds) as well as other compounds, we used to see plastisizers all the time in water samples. This included phthalates such as Bis(2-ethylhexyl)adipate as well as some other compounds such as bisphenol-A. The phthalates are very common post sample compounds that you would see related to use of certain types of labware, usually HDPE; PVC well casing; etc. I'm sure that it is present in plastic ice cube trays, most containers for bottled water, water hoses, PVC piping etc. We still commonly see phthalates in samples collected from wells with PVC piping and many of these wells have been in use for many years. As far as I know, there is not a Maximum Contaminate Limit (MCL) for phthalates or other plastisizers; however, questions have been raised about their safety as noted in the recent posting. On one project, I had to design and set up a decontamination station for sampling equipment on a site and we couldn't use any HDPE material. HDPE is the material used to make most water bottles, milk jugs, etc Everything had to be made out of stainless steel, Teflon, or polypropylene so that we wouldn't detect any plastisizers. We had to periodically collect water samples from the decon system and would have to have them analyzed for a very wide range of parameters including metals, herbicides and pesticides, VOCs, Semi VOC's, PCB's, etc. This was at a cost of about $2,000 per sample. Occasionally, we would run samples from the faucet from our job trailer just to keep the lab honest and compare it to the decon system. The decon water treatment system worked great and we never had any problems but the water from the job trailer had all kinds of interesting things in it. The source of water for the trailer was a public water supply system but I suspect many of the chemicals were coming from the PVC piping in the trailer (or possibly public water supply PVC water pipes) Occasionally, we also had to ship water samples and sometimes decon water to various sites and we would always ship them in polypropylene containers. We never had a problem with polypropylene leaching and we were commonly running our detection limits in the part per trillion level (about 5 seconds in 130 years). However, polypropylene is hard to find and you have to make an effort to find it even in the lab supply houses. If I remember correctly, a 5 gallon polypropylene carboy was a couple hundred dollars. When I did some research on the bottled water companies some years ago, it was interesting to note that many of the bottled water companies claim they have a pure source of water (whatever that is) or have a high level of treatment but then place the water in HDPE plastic containers. It has been a number of years since I've dealt with the bottled water business and I should do some new research on if and how they have solved this problem. Geary --------------------------------------------------------------------- Visit our website: http://texascavers.com To unsubscribe, e-mail: texascavers-unsubscr...@texascavers.com For additional commands, e-mail: texascavers-h...@texascavers.com --------------------------------------------------------------------- Visit our website: http://texascavers.com To unsubscribe, e-mail: texascavers-unsubscr...@texascavers.com For additional commands, e-mail: texascavers-h...@texascavers.com
