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Cancer-inducing plastic bottles?

your favourite tipple - wine, beer, spirits
88V8
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Cancer-inducing plastic bottles?

#285950

Postby 88V8 » February 21st, 2020, 6:50 pm

Hopefully none of us Fools are foolish enough to buy bottled water when we can get pure water out of the tap, but a new study suggests that the 'safe' plastics from which bottles are made are not so safe after all
https://newatlas.com/health-wellbeing/b ... 5-92456261

Presumably same applies to other bottled liquids.

Glass..... or nothing.

V8

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Re: Cancer-inducing plastic bottles?

#286128

Postby bungeejumper » February 22nd, 2020, 6:37 pm

You wouldn't want to drink the water from our taps, which is why we buy the bottled stuff for drinking. :) Our village has cast iron pipes from the Victorian era which are raddled with cracks, and which are heavily dosed with chemicals that make the water taste pretty foul. ("Pure water," did you say?) LOL, without them, we'd probably have century-old cholera strains making their reappearance! So bottles it is.

I am not a scientist (absolutely not!), and I'm not very practised in reading scientific papers, but to my eyes this article's argument seems to disappear up its own fundament, not once but several times. First it says that old-style BPA doesn't now seem to be as harmful as people used to think, and then it says that BPS (the newer substitute material) is exactly the same as BPA when it comes to the way it affects the human animal. So why pick on BPS for abolition? Why aren't people campaigning to have both of them banned?

It's at this point that the argument wanders off-course, and we get into the question of whether or not government figures for BPA (the old baddie) have ever been reliable? But even then, I can see nobody arguing that BPI (the substitute) is worse. Is it? I think we should be told.

And if (as I suspect) they don't know, then maybe we should be a bit more careful about attaching easy labels like "cancer-inducing" to our descriptions of these things? The article itself says that the 1990s belief in endocrine damage from BPA (and, as an afterthought, "possibly even cancer") is already being seriously doubted by the international health community.

Or something like that. As I've said, I'm not experienced in academic papers, but I can't quite avoid the feeling that this article illustrates why some scientists ought not to write their own research papers. The argument wanders this way and that, and it needs an editor to present the different strands in a cogent sequence. At the end of it ,we only know that (a) some people think both BPA and BPI are dangerous, (b) other people have a downer on BPI only, and (c) the US government thinks there's no major health issue, and (d) nor does a large slice of scientific opinion!

That's another twenty minutes of my life I'll never get back. :lol:

BJ

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Re: Cancer-inducing plastic bottles?

#286137

Postby AleisterCrowley » February 22nd, 2020, 7:49 pm

Life is all about managing risks - I'm not too worried if the bottled water I buy ( probably 500ml every fortnight) raises my risk of getting some lurgy by 0.327%
I spent 17 years in Slough, about 1000 ft north of the M4, and now I'm about 200ft north of the A4, 25 miles west. I reckon the effects of 20 years of diesel fumes probably swamp any risks from water containers. Not to mention the ten years in London prior to that (N8 and W5) inhaling bus and kebab fumes....
cheers
AC

(The water here -west Berkshire- is fine from the tap, but VERY hard - I have to use Yorkshire Hard Water tea to get a decent brew...)

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Re: Cancer-inducing plastic bottles?

#286155

Postby tjh290633 » February 22nd, 2020, 11:03 pm

The arguments for glass bottles are strong, but of those against, ease of breakage is foremost, followed by weight.

Easy to sterilise, durable, washable for multiple use. If you are worried, then make the changes suggested.

TJH

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Re: Cancer-inducing plastic bottles?

#286178

Postby bungeejumper » February 23rd, 2020, 8:51 am

tjh290633 wrote:The arguments for glass bottles are strong, but of those against, ease of breakage is foremost, followed by weight.

Infinite recycling capability certainly looks like a clincher, but the overall carbon footprint of a glass bottle is worse than a plastic bottle. (Says Coca Cola, who might just have a vested interest.) ;) I don't know how much extra diesel power is needed to transport a glass bottle around the place - a wine bottle weighs anywhere between 300g and 900g - but I'd guess it's a lot?

This web page makes what seems to be an intelligent fist of the question. https://tappwater.co/us/footprint-of-gl ... st-choice/ Unlike many other sites, it does accept that America's really terrible recycling record skews the data, especially when US figures are compared with European countries that have respectable recycling systems and bottle deposits that will ensure that most containers come back for re-use.

The article also agrees that, if you can refill a glass bottle 30 times, it beats TetraPak to become the cleanest solution. But AIUI, 18 refills is top whack in the real world?

The ultimate container for recycling is aluminium, it seems, with 100% recyclability, and with a can in a four-pack comfortably beating both glass and plastic on the carbon footprint scale, volume for volume. Even though you have to line the cans with plastics before you can use them at all. ;)

Interesting subject. My apologies to the OP if I went in a teensy bit hard on my demolition job - thanks for raising it. :D

BJ

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Re: Cancer-inducing plastic bottles?

#286191

Postby tjh290633 » February 23rd, 2020, 9:58 am

There has been a lot of weight reduction in glass bottles over the years, but also a big movement to single trip containers. Milk bottles are the best examples of multi trip bottles, and my memory tells me that 30 or more trips are normal. Coating technology has reduced surface damage, which has extended lives. Of course the broken bottles can be recycled, and including recycled cullet in the batch reduces melting energy by up to 10%, most seen in green glass which is melted from almost 100% recycled cullet.

With milk, of course, the distance over which the filled bottles are carried is very short. Our milk comes from Milk and More, who deliver with a fleet of Battery Electric milk floats, made in Germany. The bulk milk comes in tankers from farm to dairy. It used to come in churns by train, in years gone by.

2d on the beer bottle was a means to pocket money for kids in the past. Pop used to come in a swing top stopper bottle from Corona, who delivered to home and collected the empties. I don't think that any other containers were returned for refilling. Actually our milk used to come in a churn, delivered by Jim Burborough on his bike from his farm about 200 yards away, ladled into a jug at the back door.

TJH

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Re: Cancer-inducing plastic bottles?

#286236

Postby bungeejumper » February 23rd, 2020, 2:45 pm

bungeejumper wrote:I don't know how much extra diesel power is needed to transport a glass bottle around the place - a wine bottle weighs anywhere between 300g and 900g - but I'd guess it's a lot?

OK, apologies for talking to myself - it comes to us all eventually :? - But Jancis Robinson, the FT's wine expert, has been onto this topic this weekend. (https://www.jancisrobinson.com/articles/glass-dismissed) She reckons that a seagoing tanker carrying wine could carry two and a half times as much of the stuff in bulk containers, compared to wine that was transported in a space-inefficient shape like bottles. And although she agrees that bulk wine, or wine in plastic or aluminium containers, would never sell itself to the premier cru crowd, it does make more sense than we might suppose. Already, she says, a fair amount of UK supermarket wine has been shipped to our shores in bulk and then bottled in the UK.

She goes on to assert that wine in ring-pull aluminium cans is definitely coming. I'll believe it when I see it, personally - it would ruin the acidity, and besides it would put a helluva lot of wine waiters out of a job. :lol: But before I write it off entirely, maybe we should remember something that an archaeologist friend told me.

Namely, that the Romans spent fortunes on transporting their wine around the continent in fragile earthenware amphorae, because they'd never heard of a barrel. Not until they invaded France, and found the Gauls storing their beer and wine in these handy lightweight containers which they'd invented many centuries earlier.

At which the mighty roman empire went "Dohhhhhhhhhh", and slapped its collective forehead, and switched to using barrels. And to this day, archaeologists in Rome are still uncovering streets that are entirely paved with the useless shards of yesterday's technology. ;)

BJ

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Re: Cancer-inducing plastic bottles?

#286323

Postby servodude » February 24th, 2020, 12:12 am

bungeejumper wrote:
bungeejumper wrote:I don't know how much extra diesel power is needed to transport a glass bottle around the place - a wine bottle weighs anywhere between 300g and 900g - but I'd guess it's a lot?

OK, apologies for talking to myself - it comes to us all eventually :? - But Jancis Robinson, the FT's wine expert, has been onto this topic this weekend. (https://www.jancisrobinson.com/articles/glass-dismissed) She reckons that a seagoing tanker carrying wine could carry two and a half times as much of the stuff in bulk containers, compared to wine that was transported in a space-inefficient shape like bottles. And although she agrees that bulk wine, or wine in plastic or aluminium containers, would never sell itself to the premier cru crowd, it does make more sense than we might suppose. Already, she says, a fair amount of UK supermarket wine has been shipped to our shores in bulk and then bottled in the UK.

She goes on to assert that wine in ring-pull aluminium cans is definitely coming. I'll believe it when I see it, personally - it would ruin the acidity, and besides it would put a helluva lot of wine waiters out of a job. :lol: But before I write it off entirely, maybe we should remember something that an archaeologist friend told me.

Namely, that the Romans spent fortunes on transporting their wine around the continent in fragile earthenware amphorae, because they'd never heard of a barrel. Not until they invaded France, and found the Gauls storing their beer and wine in these handy lightweight containers which they'd invented many centuries earlier.

At which the mighty roman empire went "Dohhhhhhhhhh", and slapped its collective forehead, and switched to using barrels. And to this day, archaeologists in Rome are still uncovering streets that are entirely paved with the useless shards of yesterday's technology. ;)

BJ


canned wine coming?
it's readily available in the land of the goon bag https://bws.com.au/wine/can-wine

- sd

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Re: Cancer-inducing plastic bottles?

#286348

Postby AleisterCrowley » February 24th, 2020, 8:48 am

Crikey, look at those prices! (to get an idea in GBP divide by two)

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Re: Cancer-inducing plastic bottles?

#286362

Postby bungeejumper » February 24th, 2020, 9:45 am

AleisterCrowley wrote:Crikey, look at those prices! (to get an idea in GBP divide by two)

Most of those are for four-can packs, of course, or a litre for £10-£12, or a bottle's worth for £7.50-£9. I'm guessing that they're charging a premium for the cans, perhaps because it's less fussy about how it's kept?

When it comes to bottles,though, it reminds me of what Australians say about their wines. Most of them wouldn't be seen dead drinking Wolf Blass or Stamp of Australia or Riverside landing. (Which can be had for £3.50, £4, or £2 a bottle respectively - https://bws.com.au/wine/red-wine/shiraz).

I remember when I was working in marketing consultancy, back in the 1980s when the Aussies first came up with the idea of making wine in half-million-litre fibreglass tanks, which they would "oak" by tipping offcuts of oak trees into the mix. The French were really outraged - nobody could make wine, they said, without terroir and pure varieties and hundred year old vines and years of oak-barrel storage, and those damned antipodeans were dangerous cheats who had no respect for European tradition. :evil:

In the early days they were probably correct - Aussie grog was tangy and cheap, but rarely good. But the days of Barry McKenzie's Chateau Chunder didn't last forever.

BJ

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Re: Cancer-inducing plastic bottles?

#286370

Postby AleisterCrowley » February 24th, 2020, 10:27 am

Yes, the 'fighting wines' in bottles are closer to UK prices
It's stuff like this that shocked me
https://bws.com.au/product/672870/le-ch ... cans-250ml
(Presumably bog standard French 'Whole Lotta Rosé..." c £3.25 for a single can)

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Re: Cancer-inducing plastic bottles?

#286372

Postby bungeejumper » February 24th, 2020, 10:40 am

AleisterCrowley wrote:https://bws.com.au/product/672870/le-chat-noir-rose-cans-250ml
(Presumably bog standard French 'Whole Lotta Rosé..." c £3.25 for a single can)

Fair enough, no further questions. Although I've never understood what persuades people to drink rose anyway?

In this particular case, I have this mental image of busy women slipping a 250ml can into their handbags, or maybe their cars' glove boxes, for relief in case of urgent need. 250ml is the same size as a can of Red Bull, after all, and anybody could accidentally pick up the wrong one. A simple mistake, officer. :?

BJ

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Re: Cancer-inducing plastic bottles?

#286519

Postby servodude » February 25th, 2020, 2:03 am

if I wanted to drink a pale liquid from a black cat i'd go direct to my black cat
- but to be fair to Le Chat Noir (or their fans) it's sold for $17 a bottle so there's not too much of a mark up for being put in a can

can's are lighter and easier to pack and transport than bottles
- if they can get over the stigma, they provide a decent supply chain benefit for producers that are not working in volumes where tankers make sense
- it also lets them sell/advertise smaller quantities at greater markup (always much cheaper in Aus to buy alcohol in volume)

few years ago I was up at the Tahblilk winery for a tour
- they were the first folk to plant Shiraz in Aus (http://www.tahbilk.com.au/)
they had switched to screw top a couple of years earlier, a move that had been requested of them by Tesco in the UK and which according to them gave them an instant 5-10% improvement in yield as it removed the chance of cork taint
- cans are another step in that direction

- sd

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Re: Cancer-inducing plastic bottles?

#286571

Postby tjh290633 » February 25th, 2020, 10:55 am

servodude wrote:if I wanted to drink a pale liquid from a black cat i'd go direct to my black cat
- but to be fair to Le Chat Noir (or their fans) it's sold for $17 a bottle so there's not too much of a mark up for being put in a can

can's are lighter and easier to pack and transport than bottles
- if they can get over the stigma, they provide a decent supply chain benefit for producers that are not working in volumes where tankers make sense
- it also lets them sell/advertise smaller quantities at greater markup (always much cheaper in Aus to buy alcohol in volume)

few years ago I was up at the Tahblilk winery for a tour
- they were the first folk to plant Shiraz in Aus (http://www.tahbilk.com.au/)
they had switched to screw top a couple of years earlier, a move that had been requested of them by Tesco in the UK and which according to them gave them an instant 5-10% improvement in yield as it removed the chance of cork taint
- cans are another step in that direction

- sd

The problem with cans is that they rely on an inner coating to avoid reaction with the contents. Worse with steel cans than aluminium, but still there. I recall an impromptu blind test carried out in our laboratory in about 1960, when a beer started appearing in both cans and bottles, Double Diamond, I think. Two of us out of about 12 participants could distinguish the two by taste. My boss got almost 100% right, I got almost 100% wrong, but we could tell the difference. I was working for the British Glass Industry Research Association at the time, so we felt that we should investigate for the glass industry's sake. Fortunately the Director of Research agreed. Those were tinned steel cans, of course, and opening required the use of a triangular hole punching device. You don't see many of those around these days.

TJH

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Re: Cancer-inducing plastic bottles?

#286574

Postby servodude » February 25th, 2020, 11:16 am

tjh290633 wrote:
servodude wrote:if I wanted to drink a pale liquid from a black cat i'd go direct to my black cat
- but to be fair to Le Chat Noir (or their fans) it's sold for $17 a bottle so there's not too much of a mark up for being put in a can

can's are lighter and easier to pack and transport than bottles
- if they can get over the stigma, they provide a decent supply chain benefit for producers that are not working in volumes where tankers make sense
- it also lets them sell/advertise smaller quantities at greater markup (always much cheaper in Aus to buy alcohol in volume)

few years ago I was up at the Tahblilk winery for a tour
- they were the first folk to plant Shiraz in Aus (http://www.tahbilk.com.au/)
they had switched to screw top a couple of years earlier, a move that had been requested of them by Tesco in the UK and which according to them gave them an instant 5-10% improvement in yield as it removed the chance of cork taint
- cans are another step in that direction

- sd

The problem with cans is that they rely on an inner coating to avoid reaction with the contents. Worse with steel cans than aluminium, but still there. I recall an impromptu blind test carried out in our laboratory in about 1960, when a beer started appearing in both cans and bottles, Double Diamond, I think. Two of us out of about 12 participants could distinguish the two by taste. My boss got almost 100% right, I got almost 100% wrong, but we could tell the difference. I was working for the British Glass Industry Research Association at the time, so we felt that we should investigate for the glass industry's sake. Fortunately the Director of Research agreed. Those were tinned steel cans, of course, and opening required the use of a triangular hole punching device. You don't see many of those around these days.

TJH


Absolutely! But the technology has come on leaps and bounds; both in can materials, and conditioning of contents for drink over the last few years.
As a self confessed beer snob I was converted during blind tastes. Just couldn't pick a difference, and it used to be so obvious!

I was always tickled by the fact the can predated the can opener by a good few decades.

-sd

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Re: Cancer-inducing plastic bottles?

#286624

Postby bungeejumper » February 25th, 2020, 2:03 pm

servodude wrote:Absolutely! But the technology has come on leaps and bounds; both in can materials, and conditioning of contents for drink over the last few years.
As a self confessed beer snob I was converted during blind tastes. Just couldn't pick a difference, and it used to be so obvious!

I've been known to buy the occasional four-can pack of Speckled Hen when the price is right. It's not a craft beer, and is isn't seductively accented with the essence of eight exquisite hops specially imported from from darkest Borneo. But there isn't any chance of my confusing the canned stuff with a bottle of same. It's just a diffferent experience. Not always worse, but different.

I don't know all that much about beer at all, except that I don't care very much for high citrus hops, which give me indigestion. :| But AIUI the whole gas delivery system operates on different principles in a can, and probably with different gases. And different preservatives/stabilisers. And then there's the head, which is going to look and taste different, not least because of the different way it gets aerated as it leaves the can, as opposed to the bottle. Glug glug glug, as opposed to ripple, ripple.

Still, what do I know?
I was always tickled by the fact the can predated the can opener by a good few decades.

I think Wellington's troops at Waterloo had canned food, which they opened with hammers and chisels, and probably a lot of swearing; and George III's family famously dined on the stuff in 1813. But it took fifty years for the can opener to come along. That's a lot of A&E admissions saved. ;)

BJ

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Re: Cancer-inducing plastic bottles?

#286625

Postby JohnB » February 25th, 2020, 2:12 pm

Jerome K. Jerome, Three Men in a Boat:

We brightened up a bit, however, over the apple-tart, and, when George drew out a tin of pine- apple from the bottom of the hamper, and rolled it into the middle of the boat, we felt that life was worth living after all.

We are very fond of pine-apple, all three of us. We looked at the picture on the tin; we thought of the juice. We smiled at one another, and Harris got a spoon ready.

Then we looked for the knife to open the tin with. We turned out everything in the hamper. We turned out the bags. We pulled up the boards at the bottom of the boat. We took everything out on to the bank and shook it. There was no tin-opener to be found.

Then Harris tried to open the tin with a pocket-knife, and broke the knife and cut himself badly; and George tried a pair of scissors, and the scissors flew up, and nearly put his eye out. While they were dressing their wounds, I tried to make a hole in the thing with the spiky end of the hitcher, and the hitcher slipped and jerked me out between the boat and the bank into two feet of muddy water, and the tin rolled over, uninjured, and broke a teacup.

Then we all got mad. We took that tin out on the bank, and Harris went up into a field and got a big sharp stone, and I went back into the boat and brought out the mast, and George held the tin and Harris held the sharp end of his stone against the top of it, and I took the mast and poised it high up in the air, and gathered up all my strength and brought it down.

It was George's straw hat that saved his life that day. He keeps that hat now (what is left of it), and, of a winter's evening, when the pipes are lit and the boys are telling stretchers about the dangers they have passed through, George brings it down and shows it round, and the stirring tale is told anew, with fresh exaggerations every time.

Harris got off with merely a flesh wound.

After that, I took the tin off myself, and hammered at it with the mast till I was worn out and sick at heart, whereupon Harris took it in hand.

We beat it out flat; we beat it back square; we battered it into every form known to geometry — but we could not make a hole in it. Then George went at it, and knocked it into a shape, so strange, so weird, so unearthly in its wild hideousness, that he got frightened and threw away the mast. Then we all three sat round it on the grass and looked at it.

There was one great dent across the top that had the appearance of a mocking grin, and it drove us furious, so that Harris rushed at the thing, and caught it up, and flung it far into the middle of the river, and as it sank we hurled our curses at it, and we got into the boat and rowed away from the spot, and never paused till we reached Maidenhead.

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Re: Cancer-inducing plastic bottles?

#287341

Postby UncleEbenezer » February 28th, 2020, 9:14 am

JohnB wrote:Jerome K. Jerome, Three Men in a Boat:

For many years, reference to that passage served as a concise summary of the reason to carry a swiss army knife. :D


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