Rant - Earth Week Edition

Here is my rant about water bottles.

A few years ago I jumped on the "drink more water" band wagon. I understood the need to stay hydrated and realized that I felt better when I did. So we started buying convenient bottled water from the grocery store.

I would often refill the bottles over and over again and when I did finish with one I would recycle it. Then some studies came out that stated you shouldn't re-use a disposable water bottle. They were dangerous and would leach chemicals into the water. So I would only use them once. Of course I quickly became aware of how wasteful that was and switched to a more "green" choice, the trendy plastic water bottles made by companies such as Nalgene and CamelBak.

So we got a Brita pitcher for our fridge, kept numerous CamelBak and Nalgene bottles around the house, and we've been using these for a couple of years now. For Christmas this past year I even gave the CamelBak flip top water bottle as a gift to a few of my relatives. Imagine my horror when I recently found out that I was encouraging them to ingest dangerous chemicals that could lead to breast or prostate cancer!

Of course Nalgene and CamelBak have jumped on this, pulled their dangerous bottles off the shelf and they are producing a whole new line of "BPA Free" bottles. So I guess I will go out a buy a couple of these as soon as they are available. Or maybe a couple Sigg bottles (although I hate the taste of aluminum).

So here is the new dillema right. What do we do with our dangerous water bottles. I can't recycle them (or can I???). I don't want to donate them and kill someone. Do I just dump them in the landfill with the rest of the mistakes we've made?