Worried about BPA?

Last summer, with all the news about BPA leeching into liquids stored in various plastic water bottles, many people ditched their Nalgene bottles for the new BPA free Nalgene bottles or for another type of bottle.  One popular alternative was the aluminum SIGG bottle.  I admit, I bought two – one for work and one for home.  This bottle did have a liner made of undisclosed materials, but all the tests indicated that no BPA leached from the bottle.  The assumption on the parts of many (including many retailers) was that these liners were BPA free.

That assumption was wrong.  Last week, the CEO of SIGG published a letter on their website stating that yes, SIGG bottles were lined with a material containing BPA.  While the tests still show that no leaching occurs, a lot of customers, myself included, felt quite misled by this company.  They are now manufacturing bottles with a BPA free liner, which is a positive, but I find myself angry with SIGG for leading customers to believe that their bottles were BPA free.

I wrote a letter of complaint, and was encouraged to send my bottles in for replacements.  I have yet to decide if I’m going to do so.  While the old bottles don’t seem to be leaching anything into their contents, I don’t plan to continue using my bottles.  I might be overly cautious, but if it’s easy to be cautious, why not do it?

But for those of you who went out and replaced your old water bottles (or your children’s bottles) with SIGG products, I encourage you to check out their website, figure out which liner your bottle has, and if you have the old bottles, contact SIGG to inquire about replacements.  Or just to let them know your dissatisfaction.

Megan Smith

Megan is a 40-something government employee in the Washington, DC area. She got interested in Personal Finance when she got out of college and realized that her paycheck wasn’t going to go as far as she had hoped. Since starting this blog, she has managed to buy a house and make a solid start on her retirement goals, and hopes to help others do the same. Here is her story:

In 2007, I was a gainfully employed 20-something with no debt but not a lot of knowledge about personal finance.  It was a co-worker’s comment about Roth IRAs that sent me to the internet, searching for information.  It was then that I realized that I really didn’t know a whole lot about personal finance and that my current financial situation was due a lot to inherent frugal tendencies, generous family members, a fear of debt, and good luck.  While that was working for me, clearly I needed a better plan.

While I had no debt, I was also pretty much living paycheck to paycheck and not worrying about going over budget (I say this as if I had a real budget) because I had an emergency fund set aside to cover any overages.

Except that’s not what an emergency fund is for.

So I did a lot of research, read a lot of blogs, and decided that I needed a plan.  I needed to budget.  I needed to know what I was spending my money on.  I needed to prepare for the future.

I decided to create a blog not only to make myself accountable to others but also to share the knowledge that I gained along the way.  I’ve learned so much from my fellow bloggers, and I hope that my readers can find something useful in what I have to share as well.