PET Plastic Bottles: 50 Years of Food Safety Use
Bottled water is America's most popular packaged drink. It's a safe and affordable convenience product that tastes great and provides a healthy hydration option for millions of consumers. There is even research suggesting that drinking it may help overweight people lower their body mass index.
The popularity of bottled water makes it a convenient target for agenda-driven actors. At BottledWaterFacts.com, we've been cataloguing their false and distorted claims about a type of plastic frequently used to bottle water, and we came across what may be the strangest anti-plastic claim we've seen yet, courtesy of a new Pew Foundation report called “Breaking the Plastic Wave 2025.”
The report broadly targets PET plastic, a popular material used to package food and beverages, including bottled water, and that makes it an attack on our products, along with thousands of other products in grocery store aisles across the country. Among other provocative assertions, the Pew report makes the astounding claim that you lose “one second of healthy life” every time you drink a beverage bottled in PET plastic:
"We modelled human exposure to 30 chemicals identified in PET bottles and found that the health effects were approximately one second of healthy life lost per bottle. However, this estimate is most likely conservative because it omits non-intentionally added substances that are probably also present but cannot be assessed as their properties are unknown."
This claim, dressed in language that seems scientifically rigorous and precise, is meant to alarm readers. But a closer examination reveals that the underlying methodology is poor, the claim itself is largely speculative, and the study is of limited importance as a result.
PET: A long safety record
By way of background, PET (polyethylene terephthalate) has been used to package all manner of foods and consumer goods since the 1970s. The reason PET is a preferred packaging material for beverages, according to the authors of a 2011 review article, is because of its “excellent material properties. . ., especially its unbreakability and the very low weight of the bottles compared to glass bottles of the same filling volume. In comparison to other packaging polymers, PET has also a high clarity as well as good barrier properties towards moisture and oxygen."
Put simply, PET's clarity, strength, and barrier properties help increase shelf life and prevent contamination. And after roughly five decades of use, there is no reason to suspect that PET bottles pose a meaningful public health risk. The National Association for PET Container Resources (NAPCOR) helpfully summarizes what experts know about the safety of this versatile plastic:
"In fact, there are no chemicals of concern with PET. The safety of a product packaged in PET extends beyond the shatterproof and resealable bottle. PET is approved for food contact by the United States Food & Drug Administration, Health Canada, the European Food Safety Authority, and food safety agencies worldwide. No Phthalates, BPA, or PFAS are used in the production or processing of PET bottles."
Meaningless models
Compared to this large body of evidence documenting the safety of PET plastic, what does Pew's modeling exercise prove? Very little. The one-second figure is not a measured real-world impact, but a hypothetical scenario designed to highlight potential risks, laden with caveats that undermine its alarmist implications.
Elsewhere in the report, under the subhead “What health impacts from plastic were examined?,” the authors disclaim their conclusions. Citing "data limitations," they say they could not model potential health impacts from plastics manufacturing, or "additives and non-intentionally added substances," or even "the use phase of the plastic life cycle." Put another way, the study doesn't measure how the product is made, what's put in it, and how it actually gets used by consumers.
The bottled water industry is proud of the environmental strides we've made on everything from our carbon footprint to ensuring the recyclability of our containers. But whatever one's views on this topic, the fact remains that the materials used in bottled water containers are high-quality, durable, practical, and reliable, and nothing in the Pew study alters the extensive safety record of PET plastic as a food-contact material.