Can someone settle an argument here? Is it okay to refill plastic milk bottles (eg, to use as a water bottle)? I seem to recall reading that plastic bottles were intended for single use only, with the problem being that repeated refilling would leach chemicals in the plastic into the water. Is this wrong or has it changed?
The bottles are typically HDPE, and as such ought to have a useable life of at least 50 years.
However since the HDPE enters the normal recyclables handling chain, they are mixed with loads of other stuff, probably also physically damaged / crushed etc, and dirty, which makes simple re-use impossible.
So the HDPE material from the bottles (and other sources) needs to be extracted, and then the sent for HDPE reprocessing, which sorts and shreds the HDPE before cleaning it, and then processes it into food grade HDPE pellets. Those are then used (with the addition of some new material) to make more bottles.
Example of the process here:
Well, this is a minefield. I don't believe there are any issues, but like most things its a case of how many times. Since the scare the bottles are all tested for this, and one would hope it was banished. However, the cleaning of all the nooks and crannies in bottles, especially those where the handle can fill as well, could have consequences. I've reused bottles for myself many times and am not dead.... yet. Brian
If milk which i an emulsion of lipids in water doesn't leach things out of the bottle side walls then I doubt if tapwater will. The main worry is that you probably won't have it sterile so that your originally pure tapwater will become impure and potentially dangerous bacterially.
OTOH if you stored whisky or gin in it then all bets are off.
Clear fizzy pop bottles are considerably stronger though and as such much better suited to reuse than milk bottles. The latter are a bit on the thin side and inclined to leak if mishandled (even when brand new).
I find that, after a time, the water goes a bit milky. Tastes all right though.
One irritation is they've gone back to those not very good seals for milk bottle. In recent years they've had a much better one, but no longer.
That's logical but I suppose in all fairness I suppose the same could be said about specially manufactured water bottles.
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