Reuse that PET bottle, please!

I try and minimize the time I spend at websites that cater to a "all plastic is evil" philosophy, (or anything close to it), but this one made me laugh (thank goodness, as doing so prevented me from crying). Like many blogs out there, the post was more or less a cut-and-paste of something from somewhere else that keeps getting posting around the web ad infinitum. [*] The title appears to be quite real however, because it is so meaningless: "Plastics Part 2: The world’s most popular PET" ???? To have a "most popular" item implies that one is choosing from a list of options, but unfortunately PET is not a list of options, it is only PET. Maybe the author thought that PET is an abbreviation for "polyester" and are unaware that is stands for "polyethylene terephthalate".

The post continues along nicely with generic information about PET and its uses. The last two paragraphs however, have some uninformed ideas that are repeated way too much. Like this one:

"One common way that plastic leaches (phthalates) is through heat and sun exposure–for example, leaving a bottle of water in the car, using a container or bottle multiple times (like when refilling a disposable water bottle, and/or using a bottle that has contained a food or beverage product for months or years, like a shelved bottle of mayonnaise or honey)."

Fine, diffusion (i.e., migration) of pretty much anything increases with heat, but if this is a concern, then reusing a bottle it the ideal way to go. The bottle has only a limited amount of whatever nasty in it, and the initial fill will remove some of it, maybe a lot of it if the product spent a long time between manufacture and consumption. When the bottle is refilled, there is potentially less material available for diffusion, and decrease in potential means that less will diffuse into the fill each time. Reuse the bottle enough and you will see exceedingly low levels of whatever the concern is. Considering that an objective of reducing plastic usage is to reuse when possible, I don't see why this so many people are against resue of a plastic bottle.

And then the last paragraph leads off with a misleading statement

"There has also been concern with the compound Bisphenol-A, which is regularly used in plastic products."

Since the rest of the post has been about PET, this makes it appear that BPA is a concern in PET, certainly not the case.

So much misinformation, so little time.

[*] In many cases, these seem to be autogenerated, probably with the idea of making money off the ads. The blog discussed here does not fit into this classification, as there real contributors listed on it.