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Posted by Bill S on April 21, 2008 at 6:55:31 pm EDT
In reply to Nalgene to Stop Making Polycarbonate Bottles posted by Trailspace on April 18, 2008 at 8:38:00 am EDT

f_klock wonders

Quote:

I'm no so sure I believe that a company as large as Nalgene would go to the trouble of changing their whole mega million dollar manufacturing process if the current products were indeed SAFE to use.

Actually, yes. First, they won't have to change their "whole...process". Most of the line to make the Classic bottle will work just fine by changing the liquid resin mixture that is poured into the molds. There may have to be some adjustments in timing and temperature, but it isn't like even changing the model of car on an auto assembly line. Molds get changed all the time anyway, due to wear and tear.

Second, there are lots of examples of major changes in product lines because of suspicions. Consider the Tylenol poisoning incident. Only a very tiny fraction of bottles were involved, and those in a single store. Yet the entire industry of off the shelf medicines and packaged foods changed within a few months to "tamperproof" packaging (most of it the simple expedient of gluing a paper disk under the lid on the bottle mouth). And there are lots of cases of suspicion causing the almost total disappearance of demand for a product where the suspicion was later shown to be a false alarm, yet the product never recovered and the company dropped it from their line.

I'm not saying that the BPA thing is a false alarm. There has been plenty of evidence coming out for several years that chemicals leach into the contents. The question has been how harmful it is. Plus the attitude these days is that even a single case of excess deaths, cancer, or birth defect is too many (because I might be the winner of the lottery and get the cancer or my kid might be the deformed one). Add to that the eagerness of certain members of the torts branch of the legal profession to sue anyone and everyone who has the slightest connection to anything that might cause disease or death, and companies run scared. Companies have disappeared because of a single product that caught the litagator's eye, even though the product was a tiny part of the company's product line (and in some cases was proven later to not be the cause of the problem).

So the idea is to "cut your losses short". Unfortunately, this doesn't always help. Some in the torts community will take this as an admission that the problem is real (whether it is or not) and that the company was covering it up all the time (and sometimes juries believe this).

Maybe it is, maybe it isn't.

By the way, anyone want a couple hundred lexan bottles, many with cherished logos? We have a lot to get rid of (better safe than sorry, I say).

Wonder how many gallons of BPA I have imbibed?

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