SIGGS are (were) evil after all
Dec 18th, 2009 by C. Alexander Leigh
This news is a few months old, but it was the first I had heard of it. Apparently it turns out that the super-secret special-sauce epoxy lining in SIGG bottles does contain BPA. In retrospect, SIGG never claimed to have BPA-free bottles, they just claimed their bottles didn’t leach BPA.
From what I gather bottles manufactured prior to around August of 2008 contain the old liner, and ones manufactured afterwards contain a new powder-coated lining that does not contain any BPA. Unfortunately, my bottle has the old liner. It is easy to tell the difference, as you can see in the photo above.
The effects of this news is debatable. Unlike a lot of bottles, the SIGGs were consistently independently verified as leaching “no detectable” amounts of BPA into the water. If you aren’t drinking it, then what does it really matter. However, the tests detect in a scale of parts per billion and scientists have been noting harmful effects at levels in the parts per trillion. So the old SIGG lining could still be leaching BPA in toxic levels.
That’s really too bad, I liked my bottle and for the whatever I paid for it, I would have liked to keep it for some years. Although I suppose toxic or not I could still keep it for the rest of my life. The really bad news is I am hearing complaints that the new lining has some problems, and in some cases has delaminated from the bottle. Maybe it’s time to just go another direction entirely for my tactical water storage needs. In any event Greenberg wins one with his less-than-yuppie bottle.
Woo victory! The klean kanteen is unlined, though, just food-grade stainless. I think this makes it a little more difficult to clean. It has treated me well so far, anyway.
I never had problems cleaning mine, but I only ever put water in it. I put something else in it once, I forget, iced tea maybe, but only one time.
What the SIGG kids do though is use those tablets used for cleaning dentures. They get all fizzy or whatever and clean the gunk off pretty well from what I understand. SIGG actually sells the same thing at twice the price in different packaging.
I did some more research and decided I am going to keep drinking out of my poison bottle. They consistently test under the billions for leaching and nobody has linked those levels to any problems in adults. Plus it turns out SIGG is/was using basically the same stuff used to line canned foods and pepsi cans and stuff. So this resin compound is everywhere. I guess that’s why the inside of the sigg looks like the inside of a tomato can.
I think that news was coming out around the same time that I was looking to upgrade from my nalagene (which I still use even though it could kill me). We can mutate together!