DEBRIS.COMgood for a laugh, or possibly an aneurysm

Last week I wrote about re-using plastic bottles to reduce landfill waste. My friend Bruce pointed out the controversy about safety issues: some people claim PET plastic was not designed to withstand repeated use, and begins to break down, releasing toxins.

Clearly that’s a bad thing. I don’t need toxins in my water; I get enough of them in my salad.

A moment’s research located the controversy. But as I dug deeper, I found solid conclusions, backed up by independent lab analysis.

The mutant-baby predictions started with a research paper by a U. of Idaho student on the subject of contamination caused by PET plastic bottles. It claimed, “Four compounds, 1,4-benzenedicarboxaldehyde, benzoic acid butyl ester, 4-ethoxy-benzoic acid ethyl ester, di(2-ethylhexyl) adipate (DEHA), were found to migrate from PET bottles exposed to conditions of reuse.”

News of this paper circulated widely, fueled by “sky is falling” emails, like the one about buying a drink for a pretty girl and then waking up the next morning in a tub of ice with a note reading “call 911; we’ve just taken both your kidneys” tacked to the wall. And I think the PET/DEHA chain email held about as much truth.

The American Plastics Council published a refutation of the U. of Idaho paper, noting conclusively that “DEHA is not inherent in PET as a raw material, byproduct or decomposition product.”

But if DEHA isn’t used in making PET plastic, how did the U. of Idaho student’s analysis find traces of it in the water? According to a hoax-busting page put up by the Cooperative Research Centre for Water Quality and Treatment in Australia, “the concentrations of plasticisers detected in test bottles in [a] Swiss study were the same as those in blank water samples which had not been in contact with PET.” In other words, the U. of Idaho student hadn’t found contamination; he’d found statistical noise.

What about the other toxins identified in the original thesis? Although not addressed specifically by any of the official-sounding refutations online, they’re covered in a document from the Plastics Council entitled, The Safety of Polyethylene Terephthalate [PDF]. This paper presents a readable 2-page summary of the issue, and quotes a study by the International Life Sciences Institute that concludes,

“PET itself is biologically inert if ingested, is dermally safe during handling and is not a hazard if inhaled. No evidence of toxicity has been detected in feeding studies using animals.”

The only risk of PET bottle reuse that any of these websites admit to is bacterial infection due to poor hygiene. In other words, if you don’t wash your plastic beverage bottles, they’ll become host to potentially dangerous populations of bacteria.

The Plastics Council PDF on PET safety distinguishes PET beverage bottles from microwavable food trays — as the latter are intended for one-time use only, and are labelled as such. The implication is that reuse of beverage bottles is perfectly safe. The Plastics Council stops short of approving such reuse, but remember that they have a financial interest in the issue. The PDF quotes a second study from ILSI on the topic of “Refillable Plastic Packaging,” which states,

“… the levels of migrants potentially present in beverages packaged in PET bottles are below applicable international extraction limits that are based on safety considerations and orders of magnitude lower than levels causing adverse effects in toxicity studies. The use by consumers of PET polymer in food packaging, therefore, is demonstrated and considered safe.”

I don’t know what reuse conditions the ILSI tested, but it’s evident there is no immediate risk to reusing PET beverage bottles. Replacing bottles monthly seems like a sane compromise.

And, after that, the bottles need to be recycled. But you knew that part already.

Update 2007-02-25: Much has been written elsewhere about the scourge of plastic water bottles — e.g. water being shipped 5000 miles from Fiji (!) to California despite the presence of excellent water at the nearest tap — but rather than regurgitate that I’ll just say I bought a couple Klean Kanteens (stainless-steel water bottles) to remove myself from the plastic-bottle industry altogether.

On February 12, the Washington Post published a graph of George W. Bush’s approval ratings, superimposed with the three defining moments of Bush’s presidency: the terrorist attacks of September 11, the invasion of Iraq, and the capture of Hussein.

Sound familiar? It should. I published the same graph ten days prior.

Of course the Post’s version is much prettier than mine. They have a paid staff of illustrators. I have a paid staff of… none. No, wait — I once made $1.50 in commissions from Amazon.

In related news, some folks on a political discussion board had a debate about my graph. One poster in particular seemed to think I’d faked it — a curious response, given that the data is publicly available.

The battery in my motorcycle died again. I was downtown, in a place where every hill in sight goes up. If you’ve ever been stranded, you know what it feels like — but add to that the helmet and heavy jacket and boots and really heavy motorcycle and you’ll realize the depths of my despair. I was at the bottom of more than one sort of decline. Not only could I not get home, I’d have to carry all my gear, and deal with the dead vehicle too.

We don’t have taxis here, by the way.

After some moments of looking around dumbly, hoping for salvation to appear, I realized with a start that salvation had done just that: my bike had died one block from the garage where we have our car serviced.

Our mechanic is a great guy, always ready to help in a pinch. And I was pinched.

He was elbow-deep in a brake rebuild when I approached, yet he stopped immediately to help me jump-start the bike. He set out his portable jump-start rig (cables with attached battery). He was reaching for tools as I jogged back outside to retrieve the bike.

A half-block from the garage entrance, the street dips slightly. I hadn’t thought this would give me enough momentum to bump-start the bike, but as I rolled toward it I realized this was my last chance to drive home without getting messy. So I dug in. I pushed with everything I had. Bones bent under the strain. My boots sprouted talons. The top layer of enamel on my molars spontaneously ground to dust.

I think I achieved a whopping 10 mph. I dumped the clutch like a bucket of old paint. And with a feeble cough, the engine turned over, sputtered, and caught. Freedom!

With a wave to the mechanic, who was shaking his head in mirth at my slow-motion Flintstones sprint down the street, I sped home to arrange a maintenance visit to the Kawasaki dealership.

The bike was due for a major service: tune-up, valve adjustment, new battery, and an institutional-sized serving of TLC. Also I asked the dealership to wash the motorcycle, for it was filthy with grime and brake dust and chain wax overspray and cobwebs. Years out of maintenance, dead, and dirty, it was Frankenbike.

When I returned to the dealership, the guys in the garage were standing around, smiling at my approach. “What’s up?” I asked. “Your bike looks good,” came the reply. They were laughing because I’d dropped off a nasty, ugly thing, a real crime against motorcycling. (Even off-road bikers wash their bikes every weekend.) To their surprise, it cleaned up really nicely; under all the dirt and grime was a near-pristine motorcycle.

The service manager wouldn’t let me leave until he’d personally blown off the tiny bit of dust that had settled since the wash. Service with a smile! I shook everybody’s hands, grinning like an idiot.

I took pictures as soon as I got home. The bike may never be this clean again.

Before the Web, there was Usenet. This was a long time ago, around 1992 when I was first online. I used to spend my lunch hours — wait, who am I kidding, I spent whole workdays cruising a handful of newsgroups, seeking knowledge, entertainment, power, love, and curry.

I printed out two recipes for Indian curry because they sounded too good to be true. I carefully put them into a binder, along with recipes passed from friends and clipped from the newspaper. I carried the binder from apartment to house to house, frequently flipping to the curry pages and then moving past them for any of a variety of reasons, such as “I just ran out of whole green cardamom pods” or “Eww, this recipe calls for yogurt.” I printed these recipes in 1992 but never actually made them.

Last week I noticed the recipes again and thought, “I could eat the hell out of a curry right now.” I dispatched my wife to the whole-spice store, and the yogurt store too. Thursday would be our Usenet Curry Experience.

“This is the real thing,” boasts the recipe. “Throw out your curry powder: you’ll never use it again once you’ve tried this recipe.” You can imagine why I kept it around for 12 years. “Chicken curry using the real spices cannot be beat!”

Eagerly I minced 10 cloves of garlic (!) and a lump of ginger. I counted out the peppercorns, the cloves, the cardamom. I split the star anise to expose the fragrant seeds inside. I diced a jalapeno, measured turmeric and chili powder. My Mise en Place looked like the set of Yan Can Cook; I just needed the angled mirror overhead.

Once in Germany, a long time ago but actually several years after my Usenet curry recipes had begun their exile in my recipe binder, we stayed with friends who prepared an authentic Indian curry. The chef haphazardly tossed some whole spices into a frypan, then topped them with onions and garlic and a melange of other stuff. The result, the cook’s offhand manner notwithstanding, was outrageously good. He had a knack.

He told us he’d cut back on the amount of chili peppers called for in a truly authentic curry. He said that in his salad days, when instead of salad he ate lots of curry, he once made the full-bore recipe. He lived to make curry again, but not with all those peppers. “I had to put the toilet paper in the refrigerator” was all he would say about the episode.

With visions of such nonchalant excellence, I tossed my whole spices into the frypan. I topped them with garlic, ginger, chilis. I added spinach, dried spices, and yoghurt. I added tofu (hey, I had to draw the line somewhere). I cooked and stirred and smiled at the great aromas coming up from the pan.

The recipe makes frequent references to “gravy.” This tipped me off that perhaps all was not well with my curry. There’s very little liquid in the recipe: just oil and a half-cup of yogurt. One half-cup of liquid does not make gravy. And the oil had long since soaked into the onions.

Nevertheless, I was steadfast in my faith. I continued to cook, looking forward to a big plate of killer curry.

Well, I’m still looking forward to it. This curry was bland. I don’t know what happened to all that garlic and ginger and cinnamon and cardamom and anise and etc. You’d never know it to taste this dish. It was practically flavorless. Wait, that’s not true — I could taste the rice.

The recipe says it can’t be beat, but in fact it can — by a $1.49 jar of Madras Curry sauce from TJ’s.

Three days of rain, and our back yard is soaked. It feels like a college kid on nickel-beer night, unstable and squishy.

For the third time in 13 months, we lost a tree. I don’t mean “lost” in the sense of “misplaced.” The tree is easy to find. The roots are poking out, six feet in the air. Hard to miss, in fact.

Like last time, this one fell across the fence line. It hit another tree, bent it about 30°, and the pair are resting atop one of the fence posts. Without that post, I think both trees would have hit the ground, and taken the fence down too. So I’m feeling lucky. I sound like it, right?

The potential energy stored in this construction — all that weight, cantilevered high in the air — must be huge.

I think the tree surgeon’s bill will be huge, too. It’s going to take someone two days to set up rigging and cut these trees down.