Tiny Choices Q&A: Will Brita Pitchers Leach Impurities?
By Karina | September 24, 2007
Welcome to Tiny Choices Q&A, where we open the floor for discussion on questions which ya’ll have submitted (read the first list of questions here).
Liz Kalloch asks:
I read your post about the plastic drinking bottles, and other choices, and the plastic that “leeches” into the water, couldn’t get that picture out of my head… BUT I am wondering about the Brita Water Pitchers that filter tap water for a short list of impurities. We use one, and I have been looking at it suspiciously, wondering what is leeching into our “cleaned” water. Do you know anything about these?
First of all, I want to emphasize that Brita water pitchers are simple carbon filters. They filter out taste, mostly. When you say a short list of impurities, you are totally right. But that’s ok: municipal water in the United States is INCREDIBLY SAFE and usually of an excellent flavor. I use my Brita because the pipes in my building make my water taste not great. And I hate to say it, but the kinds of contaminants that are unsafe and may end up in our tap water will not necessarily be removed by a simple and inexpensive filtration system. I’m talking about lead, arsenic, disinfection byproducts, and microbial pathogens like e. coli or cryptosporidium. [This article has a brief rundown if you want to educate and/or scare yourself, and this is a good comparison of Brita vs. tap.] Brita filters are designed to reduce (note: not remove!) chlorine, lead, copper, cadmium, mercury, benzene, and sediment, but if you don’t change the filter as suggested you won’t be reducing the levels at all after a certain point. If you do have water that requires a filter, be sure you’re using one that is most appropriate for the contaminants in your area. Co-op America and the NRDC have very comprehensive articles about finding the right filter for you.
OK, so, required “I’m a civil engineer and our water is Darn Safe” message aside: on to the leaching plastic! Debra Lynn Dadd called Brita and found out that the pitchers are made of either styrene acrilonytrile or styrene methyl metacrylate. Now, the plastics that we hear about on the news are either polyethylene or polypropelyne. National Geographic tackled this question and determined that Brita pitchers can be used repeatedly with little risk of leaching.
Of course, it doesn’t hurt to be careful - these new leaching plastic news stories keep popping up, you know? - so don’t put your Brita into the dishwasher or leave it in the sun, and if you notice that it’s scratched on the inside you may want to discard it. Exposure to sunlight and heat are two of the ways other plastics begin to decay and leach, and scratches can hasten the decay. Another solution is to use your existing Brita filter and once the water has run through into the pitcher, transfer it into another container, like a nice old glass bottle or a glass pitcher.
Do you filter your water at home? what system do you use?
(and an aside: I have a friend who works with leeches and they are really cool! but MUCH less scary than the kinds of invisible stuff that can sneak out of plastics.)
((another aside: answering this question has made me realize that I can’t recycle my Brita filter cartridges! Co-op America recommends calling Brita at 800/24-BRITA to ask them to start recycling. I just did it, and handed over all of my information so maybe they’ll contact me for an earful! The customer service person told me that there are three kinds of plastic inside of the filters, and it would be “just too difficult” to recycle them. Which is total garbage, because you CAN recycle them in the UK, the information is here. Based on this information, I am seriously reconsidering how bad I really think my water tastes…))
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Since my home is down river from Cancer Alley and my city’s water source is the river that runs through Cancer Alley, I’ve come to realize that the Brita really isn’t cutting it (which, deep down, I already knew). So I am going to follow all of those links and do some thorough reading about multi-stage filters.
However, if taste is your only concern, you could always skip the filter and just add a lemon wedge to your glass of water. :)
if you put together an evaluation, let us know how it turns out!
Sure thing!
NYC has pretty darn good tap water, but we’re in an old building with old pipes, so we use a Brita. It’s very small, and so we use it just for filtering and pour it off into two glass “growler” jugs from microbreweries, so we have up to a gallon of fresh, cold filtered water in the house at any given time.d I drink buckets of water, and we used to keep and use plastic bottles, but great sites like this clued me in. We’ve recycled the bottles and aren’t buying any more.
I love NYC water, esp. if your pipes are good! Growler jugs are FUN. nice reuse!
Alas, this was my well:
http://www.cityofmadison.com/news/view.cfm?news_id=452
“Madison-The Madison Board of Water Commissioners this week approved the immediate abandonment of Well No. 3 located on the near east side. The well, which is the oldest well in the water system, has been plagued with problems of iron, manganese and increasing levels of carbon tetrachloride.”
oh no! well, the iron and manganese aren’t usually serious issues for grownups (they’re mainly really bad for the distribution system) but carbon tet isn’t anyone’s friend. What do you do?
They’ve changed our water source, but the water utility is a big scandal here in Madison. Essentially they don’t test wells so they won’t find out bad news. Our area is a deindustrialized corridor, so the water table is really polluted. Luckily the mayor has identified it as a major redevelopment project and if they are going to attract businesses and condos, they need to deal with the water issue once and for all.
In the meantime I use a Brita filter for taste and water softener for laundry. We have to use some serious cleaners to deal with the hard water stains and our faucet gaskets break down at least twice a year.
We use a Brita because the ground water here is really hard and tastes terrible. Once I get a working water softener I might change my mind, but for now the Brita keeps me in fresh, cold water.
Which reminds me of a question I wanted to ask: what do you guys do at restaurants? I don’t drink anything but water and the tap water tastes so bad I can’t drink it. If I’m somewhere with bottled water I take the bottle home to recycle it but I’m wondering if there isn’t another answer. Especially one that doesn’t involve alcohol.
I don’t have a problem with most tap water so I don’t mind drinking it at restaurants. If you know ahead of time that you’re going, you can bring a bottle of water with you when you go! Don’t feel awkward, just ask for an extra cup. you can hint at “dietary restrictions” if you want.
my water gets a bit of a funky city taste, so i use a brita filter.
i’m sort of starting to wonder if there is anything in this world that isn’t going to kill me eventually. really, i’m just about resigned to the fact that the cancer will get me.
that said, how do i know when to throw out my nalgene? in order words, when will it start leaching? and also, is it recyclable?
“Normal wear-and-tear and cleaning of polycarbonate plastic bottles in a dishwasher, Hunt says, could cause the chemical to leach, and the amount of leaching increases as the plastic ages and is degraded by use. A separate study published in July in Environmental Health Perspectives confirmed this finding, and also detected leaching from new polycarbonate plastic.”
http://www.sierraclub.org/sierra/200311/lol5.asp
Note that it’s the new colored Nalgenes that are made of polycarbonate (#7) plastic, those are the most concerning. The old-skool grey Nalgenes are #2 which is considered relatively safe. Still, I’m sticking with glass. Voss sells their water in sleek glass water bottles at about $3 and are quite reuseable - I keep one at work, one in my car and one at home.
Thanks for the Brita recycling link in the UK! They provided a freepost address that you can send your used cartridges! YAY!..
Karina,
Thank you for this Q&A!!!
I have been worried about the whole plastic baby bottles thing for the last couple months. I have a 5-month-old son and the first couple months I used the hard plastic baby bottles that are a source of debate. My son and I weren’t hitting the ball out of the park on the breastfeeding thing, so I nursed but also pumped. And pumped. And pumped. But I generally fed him the pumped milk from the hard plastic baby bottles. (I also used a little formula to supplement when needed.)
Around 2 months he finally began getting efficient at nursing, so I didn’t have to use the bottles often, but it wasn’t until then that I stumbled upon the plastic bottles debate.
Needless to say, I sorta freaked. I was so worried. I thought all the good I had done by pumping and giving him breastmilk was going to be offset by the bad leaching chemicals. The only positive thing was that I really only washed the bottles in warm, soapy water. I never once heated them in a microwave and I only ran them in the dishwasher three or four times total.
Anyway, I got rid of them and began using the soft plastic bottles that come with the Medela pump (supposedly they’re safe). Not long after, I went back to work and while I’ve continued to pump, my little guy needs several ounces of formula a day. Well, we mix that with water from a large Brita container. Of course, lo and behold, one night I look at the Brita and think — Oh no! I’ve been using water from a hard plastic container! Since then, I’ve been wondering if the Brita plastic is as bad as the plastic used in the Playtex, Avent, Dr. Brown, etc., baby bottles.
From your answer, it sounds like it’s probably not as bad, plus I haven’t put our Brita in a dishwasher, we keep it out of the sun on the kitchen counter and it’s fairly new so it’s in good condition.
Still, might be better to err on the side of caution. I like the idea of running the water through the Brita and then keeping it in a glass pitcher.
Anyway, THANK YOU! i finally feel better and i hope my son’s exposure to the bad chemicals hasn’t been that high after all.
I also hope other people, whether they’re feeding formula or breastmilk, will consider staying away from the hard plastic baby bottles. Even if some of the research is inconclusive, I think it’s just better to be safe than sorry.
I also hit upon the idea of filtering the water through a Brita filter, then storing it in glass, but I was stymied by the fact that Britia’s directions say to keep the filter at least partially immersed in water to prevent its drying up and becoming dysfunctional. I’m curious how the glass bottle-storage adherents are dealing with that tiny detail. Thanks!
I keep the filter submerged in a glass jar and change the water
every time I use it.
A bit of a pain, but this is what i came up with when I started hearing about plastic problems a few years ago
The pitcher is made from some type of styrene which altho hard if it leaches is also as problematic as pba.
The plastic in the filter cartridege is supposed to be ok.
just to be clear , I am keeping the cartridge filter in a glass jar
_seperate_ from the pitcher the filtered water is in.
Keep water in the brita container and keep the filter neck in it. When you are ready to filter into a glass container, take out the filtering section, do your filtering and put it back in. It’s not rocket science.
[...] I found this article which talks about Britta filters and BPA: http://tinychoices.com/2007/09/24/189/ [...]
[...] posted a little bit about the Brita filters here and how they can’t be recycled, when I answered a Q&A on whether or not Brita pitcher plastic will leach. So I was really [...]
What do you know about aluminum bottles, like the Sigg ones I’ve seen so many European hikers using? Does anyone know if they have a PBA-based lining, like a lot of tin cans do? Thanks in advance.
This was taken from the mysigg.com site’s Q&A regarding the inner lining:
“SIGG has perfected the formula of its proprietary inner liner over decades of scientific research and Swiss engineering. The ingredients (like the formula for Coca-Cola) remain secret and unavailable to 3rd parties so as to ensure SIGG retains its competitive advantage. The key of course is that the SIGG liner is FDA approved and independently tested to be taste and scent inert – and resistant to any leaching (0.0%) so 100% safe.”
So, it’s a “secret formula”. Sounds scary to me! I’ll stick with stainless steel like Klean Kanteen or Enviro Products. (I own both.)
I wish Britta would get smart and make a glass water pitcher. it’s ridiculous that a company that is supposed to be selling a product that improves water would drop the ball on this.
http://www.productswithstyle.com/cart/index.php?main_page=product_info&cPath=8&products_id=11
Here is a link to a company that makes a glass pitcher that is compatible with the Brita filter.
In Europe, we have glass brita pitcher and there is other model that even boils the water. The filters and slightly different from the American filter though I do not know why.