What the heck is BPA?

We've been fans of the Camelbak water bottles for quite a while now. The boys have the small versions to take with them to school in their lunch boxes. LW and I have the larger size for during or after exercise.

Recently when we had visitors from the mainland, we got in the car to do the touristy thing around the island. I put my Camelbak water bottle in the cupholder in the car, and E asked me if it was BPA Free. I said, "Is it what???" I had never even heard of Bisphenol A (BPA) until he told me about it. (Aside: Like I said before, I always end up learning cool stuff whenever we get to visit with P&E.)

The wikipedia artcile on BPA is pretty informative. It turns out, this BPA stuff can be toxic. Of more concern is that when it gets hot (like if you left your water bottle in the car), it leeches out the BPA 55 times faster than it normally does.

There's no legislation against using BPA in plastic products yet, but apparently a lot of companies that make reusable water bottles, baby bottles, sippy cups, etc are changing to use BPA-Free plastics. Walmart and Toys-R-Us have declared they will no longer sell products such as baby bottles with BPA plastics.

We were happy to find that as of April 2008, Camelbak is now making all BPA-Free water bottles, and LW just got us some new Camelbak bottles to replace our old ones.

How can you tell if your water bottle is BPA free or not?

Apparently the products that had BPA in them had the recycle symbol with a 3 or a 7.





The newer BPA-Free water bottles from Camelbak have a little symbol that say "BPA Free" with two little leaf silouettes.