Once upon a time there was a conscientious Stuffoholic who felt increasingly more guilty about the number of plastic water bottles going in her recycling box each week. The answer, she decided, was to purchase a snazzy new drinks bottle which could be used over and over again. Off she went to an online retailer named after a very long South American river, where she spotted the very thing she was after…

It was neon green, it was unbreakable, it was cheap, and it was BPA FREE.

It said so…

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(along with some other stuff, mostly in Chinese.)

Though she liked the sentiments expressed on the bottle- Exquisite life Start from here- the bit about BPA was the clincher. Pretty much everything she’d seen online supported avoiding products containing Bisphenol A, a possible health hazard. It is commonly used in the production of polycarbonate, a high-performance transparent, rigid plastic which is formed into food containers,  infant feeding bottles, sports bottles, etc (despite the fact that potentially harmful BPA has been found to leach into food and drinks.)

This bottle seemed the ideal solution…. reusable, free from harmful chemicals and a particularly cheerful colour. Sadly, it did not live up to expectations. The truth is, it whiffed. Removing the fluorescent lid released a distinct eau de paddling pool. It smelled very, very plastic-y.

Back on the site the bottle had come from, previous customers were similarly unimpressed…

“Funny smell about these bottles no matter how much I clean them.”

“How can we be sure the product is BPA free? I had no idea it was coming from China.”

And this is where the yen dropped… the bottle was a bargain, it was brightly coloured and tough, but was it lying? A more optimistic customer had replied:

“We can’t be sure. However, it does say ‘BPA free’ on the product and it does feel to me like a quality product” -not an overly convincing argument.

The untrustworthy bottle was quickly found a new purpose in life:

Now we are looking for a glass drinks bottle, and someone to translate the Chinese writing on our new vase. Please drop us a line, if you can help with either.