Word: plasticities
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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...PLASTIC SURGERY...
Sources: CNN Money; USA Today; American Society for Aesthetic Plastic Surgery (2); USA Today (2); AP; Encyclopedia Astronautica
...water should be a gloriously guilt-free activity. H2O won't make you fat, give you cancer or stain your teeth a revolting shade of yellow. It's second only to soda as the American beverage of choice, ever since marketers thought to package it for us in handy plastic bottles. But now the green lobby informs us we may as well be clubbing baby seals with our Evian bottles, so great is the environmental havoc wreaked by their manufacture and disposal. Some resourceful consumers have taken to reusing the containers multiple times; others have switched to reusable water bottles...
While we fuss over the impact of water containers on the environment, however, most of us have overlooked their potential impact on our health. Many water bottles on the market, like many soda containers, are made of a hard plastic called polyethylene terephthalate, or PET. While the material is perfectly safe for single use, it's not designed for repeated reuse, says Kellogg Schwab, an environmental microbiologist at Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health: "Your mouth leaves a film that harbors bacteria, and the bottle's narrow mouth makes it hard to clean...
Reusable water bottles merit scrutiny as well. Like many rock climbers, Scott Belcher used to carry a Nalgene water bottle made of polycarbonate, a sturdy, clear plastic. As an associate pharmacology professor at the University of Cincinnati, he knew that polycarbonates contain bisphenol A (BPA), a synthetic hormone that mimics estrogen. What he didn't know was if or how much BPA wound up in his water. In experiments, he learned that trace amounts of BPA do seep into room-temperature water. But he was startled to find that when the containers were filled with boiling water--a common practice...