Minimizing plastic exposure is one of the easiest green kitchen and lifestyle choices you can make that offers big rewards in terms of personal health and planet health. Why?
Many plastics are made with polycarbonate, which in turn is made from bisphenol A (BPA) a chemical correlated with hormone disruption, obesity, adverse neurological effects and other not so cool health issues. When plastics aren’t made with BPA they’re still a major drain on the planet and resources. Even if you recycle (which plenty of Americans don’t) recycling is expensive and causes another whole set of environmental problems.

How BPA gets to you: …read more

I’d always used plastic containers for leftover food. I never thought about it much, but as those containers started to show their age I replaced them with glass.

Glass is an ideal food storage container. It doesn’t absorb odors or stain like plastic. It’s also not easily scratched. You won’t find it warping either!

Pyrex storage containers come with a BPA-free plastic lid that makes food storage more secure. It’s also completely dishwasher safe. I feel better about reheating in the microwave when using a glass container. I wish I had gotten rid of my plastic containers years ago.
What do you use …read more

Last month I mentioned that my wife and I are using Medela BPA-free plastic baby bottles after finding out that certain baby bottles leech chemicals into their contents. My wife almost exclusively breast feeds, but we chucked the Dr. Browns bottles we had within minutes of hearing the new.
I mentioned that we went out and bought Medela brand bottles, specifically because that was all that was left on shelves in a local store. However there are other brands of BPA-free plastic bottles out there. A reader named Campbell was kind enough to mention the Green to Grow brand of bottles. …read more

After the news about BPA leeching from baby bottles, my wife and I set out to find some alternatives. I have been unable to find glass bottles in the few stores I have looked in, but we were able to find BPA-free bottles from Medela. We would have purchased more, but only three were left in the store, the rest had sold out.
As a refresher, a recent study found that heating bottles and the degradation caused by dishwasher heat and detergent, as well as the acidity of certain juices causes the carcinogenic chemical BPA to leech into bottle contents.