Toronto Star: Sigg bottle liners have trace of chemical BPA

Toronto Star, Catherine Porter
Published September 3, 2009

You know those aluminium Sigg bottles you ran out to buy, replacing all your Nalgene ones last year because of fears around bisphenol A? Well, it turns out they have trace amounts of the gender-bending toxic chemical, too. The Swiss manufacturer followed up its bizarre announcement that it had replaced the old epoxy liners with new non-BPA ones with an apology yesterday to customers who felt misled by the company. That didn't placate concerned parents who bought the expensive bottles precisely to avoid the endocrine-disrupting chemical found in hard polycarbonate bottles. The company never advertised its product specifically as "BPA-free," Sigg CEO Steve Wasik said in a apologetic letter posted on the company's website yesterday. The message was "they were free from leaching and safe." But when the Environmental Working Group, a U.S. environmental agency, stated Sigg used BPA in the lining of its bottles as part of a BPA information package in 2006, the company threatened a lawsuit, EWG president Ken Cook said. "They huffed and puffed that there was completely no BPA in them. It turns out there was. That's clearly misleading people," he said. The firm says the older bottles with a "trace amount" of BPA in the liner are safe and show "0 per cent leaching of BPA," Wasik stated in a letter posted online last month. Click on the following link to read the entire story. http://www.thestar.com/news/gta/article/689714