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Cleaning Water Bottles

PostPosted: Thu Nov 04, 2010 6:32 pm
by pitney
Here is a trick for cleaning those water bottles if your hand is too large.

Get some denture cleaner tablets, fill the bottle with warm water, add a tablet, close, shake and let sit over night. Rinse. Does a great job.

pitney

Re: Cleaning Water Bottles

PostPosted: Thu Nov 04, 2010 6:48 pm
by DukeJH
I just use a bottle brush and dish soap.

Re: Cleaning Water Bottles

PostPosted: Fri Nov 05, 2010 12:07 am
by mrchad9
1000Pks wrote:Dishwashing liquid and boiling hot water does the trick for me. Don't be like the mentally debilitated enviro club member who uses clorox and then dumps it all into the drain. It goes into the river, not where it should unless you like dead fish and similar. If you have BPA free bottles, of course. If not, throw all of them away.

Your home sewage does not go straight into a river with fish in it, clorox in it or not.

Re: Cleaning Water Bottles

PostPosted: Fri Nov 05, 2010 12:26 am
by MoapaPk
Yes, if you put a fish in bleach, it will die. However, when sodium hypochlorite is diluted and the pH is not forced to 11, it typically degrades to salt and oxygen within 3 days. So I don't recommend that you pour 5 trillion gallons of bleach into your bottles to disinfect them, but a small amount will do the job, with absolutely minimal environmental impact.

Myself, I normally just use water to wash my bottles. If they do get too funky from careless storage, I normally just use a brush and detergent. I typically use recycled PETE bottles (recycle #1), working off the irony; I've had some for 8 years.

Re: Cleaning Water Bottles

PostPosted: Fri Nov 05, 2010 12:46 am
by MoapaPk
1000Pks wrote:Water bottles for water, food for food containers, a slight swirl rinse and it keeps them good. The mentally debilitated will actually drink clorox, since it is diluted with water and you don't let that go to waste!


Actually, many who are not mentally debilitated drink water purified with a few drops of sodium hypochlorite solution, rather than die from the parasites in the water. The parasites can go to the brain, making people massively paranoid (little exaggeration there for comic effect).

Amazingly enough, amount and concentration do make a difference. For example, you will die without a bit of sodium every day; but if you east 5 lbs of salt, you will also die.

Diluted sodium hypochlorite also degrades quickly from interaction with organic matter. Even more amazing, sewage often contains organic matter.

Re: Cleaning Water Bottles

PostPosted: Fri Nov 05, 2010 1:38 am
by Tonka
You guys wash your bottles? I don't think I've ever used anything beyond the hottest water that comes out of the tap. It's my general policy to never let soap touch my pots, pans and wine glasses. I guess it has carried over to my nalgenes.

Now what they are made of may be a different story :?

Re: Cleaning Water Bottles

PostPosted: Fri Nov 05, 2010 2:42 am
by mrchad9
1000Pks wrote:
MoapaPk wrote:
1000Pks wrote:Water bottles for water, food for food containers, a slight swirl rinse and it keeps them good. The mentally debilitated will actually drink clorox, since it is diluted with water and you don't let that go to waste!


Actually, many who are not mentally debilitated drink water purified with a few drops of sodium hypochlorite solution, rather than die from the parasites in the water. The parasites can go to the brain, making people massively paranoid (little exaggeration there for comic effect).

Amazingly enough, amount and concentration do make a difference. For example, you will die without a bit of sodium every day; but if you east 5 lbs of salt, you will also die.

Diluted sodium hypochlorite also degrades quickly from interaction with organic matter. Even more amazing, sewage often contains organic matter.


Good science, thanks. Wish you could explain this to the local enviro club!

You'll find many or most of them happily polluting, washing plenty of toxins down the storm drains. It's so bad here they have to paint the drains with logos, dead fish from dumping poison! Not that anyone would understand or even care, I would never eat anything out of the Sac river!

That's where I put my used motor oil. Soap and bleach is man made, and needs proper treatment, but oil came out of the ground anyway. And dumping a few gallons surely cannot affect much. BP dumped 2 1/2 supertankers worth and everyone seems fine with it.

Re: Cleaning Water Bottles

PostPosted: Fri Nov 05, 2010 3:17 am
by chugach mtn boy
MoapaPk wrote:
1000Pks wrote:The mentally debilitated will actually drink clorox ...


Actually, many who are not mentally debilitated drink . . . sewage ...


1000Pks wrote:Good science . . . I would never eat anything out of the Sac river!

mrchad9 wrote: That's where I put my used motor oil. Soap and bleach is man made, and needs proper treatment, but oil came out of the ground anyway. And dumping a few gallons surely cannot affect much. BP dumped 2 1/2 supertankers worth and everyone seems fine with it.

Mr. Chad, you are bad! :twisted:

Re: Cleaning Water Bottles

PostPosted: Fri Nov 05, 2010 3:43 am
by lcarreau
"There are many practical uses for used motor oil. A primary use is to re-refine it into a base stock for lubricating oil. This process is very similar to the refining of crude oil. The result is that the re-refined oil is of as high a quality as a virgin oil product. "

And, the more virgin, the better..

Image

Re: Cleaning Water Bottles

PostPosted: Fri Nov 05, 2010 5:55 am
by Day Hiker
mrchad9 wrote:
1000Pks wrote:Dishwashing liquid and boiling hot water does the trick for me. Don't be like the mentally debilitated enviro club member who uses clorox and then dumps it all into the drain. It goes into the river, not where it should unless you like dead fish and similar. If you have BPA free bottles, of course. If not, throw all of them away.

Your home sewage does not go straight into a river with fish in it, clorox in it or not.


Exactly. Unless you live in some third-world shithole.

I didn't read every word in the thread, but you guys do realize that wastewater treatment plants commonly chlorinate and then DECHLORINATE the water as part of the treatment process. The water must be dechlorinated before being released.

Re: Cleaning Water Bottles

PostPosted: Fri Nov 05, 2010 5:56 am
by MoapaPk
Pete-baiting aside, I sometimes use peroxide (H2O2 solution) to kill the nasties. No residue after it decomposes. I use the leftover to dye my beard gray.

Re: Cleaning Water Bottles

PostPosted: Fri Nov 05, 2010 6:03 am
by MoapaPk
Day Hiker wrote:I didn't read every word in the thread, but you guys do realize that wastewater treatment plants commonly chlorinate and then DECHLORINATE the water as part of the treatment process. The water must be dechlorinated before being released.


No shit. (rimshot.)

Actually, didn't Vegas start the move to ozone treatment? There was a concern that the chlorinated organics would persist in the environment.

And now for a full circle analysis... Denture-cleaning tablets usually contain chemical oxidants; not chlorinated, but still perborates or such.

Re: Cleaning Water Bottles

PostPosted: Fri Nov 05, 2010 3:13 pm
by welle
mrchad9 wrote:
1000Pks wrote:Dishwashing liquid and boiling hot water does the trick for me. Don't be like the mentally debilitated enviro club member who uses clorox and then dumps it all into the drain. It goes into the river, not where it should unless you like dead fish and similar. If you have BPA free bottles, of course. If not, throw all of them away.

Your home sewage does not go straight into a river with fish in it, clorox in it or not.


It eventually makes it into the ocean - where do you think the chlorine goes? While 1000Pks gripe with Sierra Club turned into a running joke here on SP, I agree with him on the Clorox issue, SC's endorsement of Clorox was plain wrong.

Re: Cleaning Water Bottles

PostPosted: Fri Nov 05, 2010 3:39 pm
by MoapaPk
welle wrote:It eventually makes it into the ocean - where do you think the chlorine goes? While 1000Pks gripe with Sierra Club turned into a running joke here on SP, I agree with him on the Clorox issue, SC's endorsement of Clorox was plain wrong.


There is actually quite a bit of chlorine in the ocean; sea water is almost 2% chlorine. The question is whether oxidized chlorine makes it to the oceans, and in general, it doesn't. Also true, there isn't a one-to-one correspondence between the elemental content of what we dump in sewers, and what enters natural waters. There is a fair concern that some chlorinated hydrocarbons remain in sewage sludge, but that's pretty far from his concern.

Do you know how most municipalities treat drinking water and waste water? Read Day Hiker's comments above.

Re: Cleaning Water Bottles

PostPosted: Fri Nov 05, 2010 4:15 pm
by MoapaPk
I'm not sure if you will interpret this correctly, but I'll take a chance:
http://blogs.law.harvard.edu/corpgov/20 ... attention/

As you can see, there are far more direct ways that man-made hypochlorite can make into the oceans. This plan is still on the books; direct treatment of ballast water with a small amount of bleach solution. If the expelled water is not diluted, it is toxic to some critters; but even with this very direct treatment -- designed to keep tankers (e.g. off the CA coast) from spreading disease to your beaches -- the oxidized products disappear in short order. This is likely to be a far more significant source than hypochlorite from people cleaning water bottles.

Chlorinated sewage can be a problem:
http://www.springerlink.com/content/v557h6w0hq624881/

...but only in the initial outfalls of the sewage, and then only a weak "maybe." But most important, this chlorination is not from people disinfecting water bottles-- it's from intentional chlorination of sewage in some treatment plants. These man-made effects swamp the ones of your concern.

Ironically, hypochlorite may be more benign than perborate (used in denture-cleaning tabs); it tends to degrade in seawater:
http://www.stormingmedia.us/43/4379/A437951.html