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Comment by Reason077 | Hacker News Reader

> "This frequently means I’ll be extremely thirst throughout some days"

Why not carry a reusable water bottle? I have a great double-wall steel bottle (Hydro Flask), which is much better than a plastic bottle because it keeps water cold all day long and is basically indestructible.

In most places I travel to it's not difficult to find sources of clean, cold water to refill it. Worst case, I will buy a large bottle of water to refill it from, which at least is cheaper and generates less waste than using multiple small plastic bottles throughout the day.

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>I have a great double-wall steel bottle (Hydro Flask), which is much better than a plastic bottle because it keeps water cold all day long and is basically indestructible.

They actually dent quite easily. I have a 40oz Hydro Flask with a couple dents from an incident with a spider a couple years ago. I had my bottle on the counter top while I was eating and suddenly a spider was on it. In an attempt to kill the spider, I knocked over the bottle on to the wooden floor (trying to squish it). It dented the bottle near the top and on the bottom. I looked up some videos and it's definitely not just me. Found one where it looked like a whole family dented theirs and they used a trick with dry ice and a hair dryer to fix them. I don't know if it gets harder to fix the longer you wait. Mine still works okay, so I haven't done anything about it.

I'm pretty sure the outside is aluminum, fyi, unless they make multiple types. The inside part is probably steel.

I love my Hydro Flask and have drank more water because of it. My only complaint is that the straw lid gets a lot of crap building up in the small gaps and it seems impossible to adequately clean. Maybe an ultrasonic cleaner could do it.

I've had good luck with Simple Modern steel bottles, including back when I still hiked and did urbex and kept one strapped to the side of my backpack. It came through everything from scrambling up and down steep forested hillsides to getting bounced off crumbling masonry with little more than the occasional chip or scratch to the finish. I've dropped it plenty of times too, of course, and it's likewise survived unscathed.

I can't vouch for its durability when used to beat a spider to death because I'm not afraid of tiny harmless animals, but in every other respect I have nothing but praise.

I've had the same hard plastic Nalgene water bottle for 10 years or so. Doesn't dent, doesn't break, costs about $10.

> "I'm pretty sure the outside is aluminum, fyi, unless they make multiple types. The inside part is probably steel."

The original standard Hydro Flask is, except the lid, entirely Type 304 stainless steel (aka: 18/8 steel), powder coated on the outside.

For me, there's always a metallic residual taste in my water whenever I use a stainless steel bottle. Got tired and returned to using normal mugs.

Which brand(s) did you use? I use Contigo, Stanley, Alaaddin and (old) Starbucks tumblers and bottles, and they leave no taste in the water.

Many of the metal water bottles come with a plastic liner to avoid the metallic taste

Some also come with a non-stick (Teflon-type) coating. Zojirushi makes incredibly nice vacuum-insulated bottle [1] that unfortunately has a non-stick liner. The inside of the bottle is super easy to clean, but the chemicals used in the manufacturing are awful.

[1] https://www.zojirushi.com.hk/enproductsview.php?oid=6&tid=17...

Good you mention a teflon-type coating in a discussion about 'forever chemicals'.

Zojirushi also makes them without the liner. It’s a choose-your-poison situation: the lined ones seem to perform much better with green tea.

Interesting, I wasn't aware of that. What do you mean by "perform" here?

Could be the green tea is made with slightly lower temperature water so less likely to leach chemicals off of the liner

In theory the liner is PTFE (or maybe a different fluoropolymer) with nothing left to leach out. PTFE and its relatives are stable to temperatures well above that of boiling water, so leaching shouldn’t be an issue.

(One big problem with PTFE is that it starts to slowly decompose at a lower temperature than its melting point. This makes it messy to work with. As I understand it, the decomposition products are gasses, so this is a problem at the factory and for the environment, but I don’t think its a problem for end users.)

Green teas seem to stop tasting good after a fairly short time stored in a stainless steel bottle.

If you’re sensitive to metallic residual taste, then look for containers made from a type of stainless that meets your needs. There are many kinds [1], I prefer 316 but you might need 321 for example. Some day I’ll engage a machinist to fab one up for me that uses standard gaskets I can get from any MRO firm in the world.

[1] https://www.brikksen.com/home/page/blog?p=the-different-grad...

Stainless steel starts with a metallic taste, but after first week of use it is usually gone. Also there is titanium and aluminium.

Or just get a reusable plastic one, perfect can be an enemy of good.

Individual use of plastic is not relevant, as long as it goes to landfil and not ends up in the ocean througg recycling fraud. In UK most plastic ends up sent to poland, where it's burnt or sent onwards to Turkey where it becomes untraceable. I stopped recycling plastic because the system cannot be trusted - at least if it stays in UK you know it wont be hurting anyone.

Half of plastic waste in the ocean waste is discarded fishing nets.

I once did a fair amount of experimentation and found titanium to impart a much stronger metallic taste than stainless steel.

Aluminum is not an amazing food contact surface — it’s quite reactive. I would not use an uncoated aluminum bottle for anything other than plain water.

I have never tried titanium, surprused to hear it does that.

The aluminium bottle I have is likely coated, I wouldn't know - i do use it just for water, and it seems fine.

I have never tried titanium, surprused to hear it does that.

The aluminium bottle I have is likely coated, I wouldn't know - i do use it just for water, and it seems fine.

Glass is an option

Glass with a silicone sleeve over it is surprisingly resilient. I have had a few glass bottles with silicone covers that I carry around (not all at once...) and have dropped them more times than I can recall and they always just bounce. Of course they can break, especially if you do something like put it in your shopping cart and drop something heavy on it (whoops).

The inertness of glass not only makes it always the first choice for food contact, it's also the most cleanly recycled material on the planet, when it does break. Unlike plastics (which for all practical purposes can't really be recycled), and metals, which require complex separation and realloying, glass can be easily separated visually and reused indefinitely. It is quite likely that the glass in your refrigerator right now contains glass first produced by the Romans.

(Of course, we should just reuse glass containers, like we did when I was a kid - a small deposit is a big motivator for kids to collect bottles for reuse!)

Big caveat that all that recyclability really only works for clear glass.

Glass is heavy and causes transportation tires to generate more micro plastics on the highway and has a higher co2 emission burden.

That's a good point. Need to stop subsidizing over the road trucking and build more rail. Much more efficient.

More than steel? We're talking about reusable bottles here, shipped empty. What is the comparison of empty glass or steel to full plastic? What is the difference in mass?

Why not aluminum

There exist industrial reaction vessels etc which are made of stainless steel with a bonded liner made of glass. That seems like the ideal "forever" food container material to me - chemically nonreactive and easy to clean, but lightweight and resilient to impact. The glass layer would be lost in recycling, but it shouldn't impede recycling the metal too badly as it'd just be a tiny bit more slag in the crucible.

It’s definitely a choice. I prefer to travel light even if it means I’ll be thirsty sometimes.

There are some truly tiny and thin metal flasks. Even a little water is surely better than none.

Yes, but if you're sipping out of one at, say, the dog park, don't be surprised if people give you funny looks.

I've seen people try to have a full course fast food meal at a dog park. Maybe they got some funny looks (mostly from the canines), but everything was fine in the end.

Life's too short to be worried about funny looks.

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