headlessparrot's Full Review: Nalgene 32 oz Wide Mouth Water Bottle
If the SIGG bottle is a triumph of style over substance (cool though it may be), then what does that make Nalgene? Mostly, it makes the company, and its line of heavy-duty drinking bottles, a triumph of either utilitarianism or a “screw it, it’ll do” spirit.
A brief history lesson: Nalgene (also known as Nalge Nunc International) was formed by the 1995 merger of two firms (Nunc A/S and Nalge Company), with a history dating back to 1949. They primarily produced polycarbonate lab equipment: bottles, jars, test tubes, Petri dishes, etc. (as well as cages for lab animals, which has been the source of periodic outcry), that was useful for being lightweight, shatterproof, and odour and stain-resistant. At some point – around the 1970s – Nalgene containers became rather popular with backpackers, for many of the same reasons that they were useful in a laboratory setting. Initially ordered through laboratory supply companies (or via a five-finger discount), Nalgene caught onto the marketing potential – of, in part, ‘wilderness chic,’ as Wikipedia terms it – and by the 1990s was selling a line of Nalgene Outdoor Products. The rest, as they say, is history.
The shining star of this Nalgene Outdoor Products line is the Nalgene 1 L (32 oz) Wide Mouth Water Bottle – made of the same lab-quality polycarbonate (Lexan) previously mentioned: a hard, durable plastic with rather favourable properties. It is an exceptionally popular purchase, widely available in a number of colours and at essentially any sporting goods store you can think of (but especially those with a leaning toward adventure sports). This availability has been somewhat limited in Canada by its unceremonious dismissal from the shelves of Mountain Equipment Co-op and Lululemon stores, but rest assured – if you’re looking for a Nalgene bottle, you will find one. The 1 litre Nalgene is broad, capped by a wide mouthed opening, a screw-on loop top cap (which handily attaches to the squat neck), and measurement markings on the outside walls (in both ounces and milliliters). This last feature is no doubt a relic of the company’s lab equipment pedigree, but is actually one of the great things about the Nalgene design.
First the good – and despite my concerns, there is a fair amount of good, arguably more so than with the SIGG bottles I’ve already examined. They hold liquids well. This one is a no-brainer (and truthfully, I can’t ever recall owning a water bottle that has sprung a leak anyway). And the bottle does not, for the most part, impart any flavour on the liquid – it’s more or less taste neutral (more on this later). But this is almost an afterthought to the Nalgene bottle’s greatest strength – that being, appropriately enough, its strength. While I initially described the SIGG bottle as ‘nigh-indestructible,’ a better descriptor might be ‘mostly indestructible.’ The Nalgene, on the other hand, would be best described as nigh invulnerable; it is (barring the cap, which is replaceable, in any event) essentially the Fort Knox of drinking bottles. Obviously, this is not a pressing concern for the average consumer who will not be dueling grizzlies, but I suppose it’s somewhat reassuring to know that your drinking bottle can survive, say, being run over by a tractor-trailer or being dropped from thirty stories – and all without a dent (in the former case, the bottle temporarily warps but immediately returns to form). There are even hush-hush tales of an alleged ‘secret’ lifetime guarantee; if you mail the company a broken Nalgene bottle, they will supposedly return a new one (or multiple new ones) for free, no questions asked. This, as you can imagine, has lead to immensely fun bouts of ‘kill the Nalgene’ (the youth of today are nothing if not needlessly nihilistic). Alas: the exterior will scratch, the markings will fade, and the screw-top poly loop cap may break, but you can rest assured knowing that otherwise, your Nalgene bottle will probably outlast you. This is alternately either or a totally comforting or utterly horrifying prospect.
And unlike the SIGG bottle, those exterior scratches won’t break your heart, because the Nalgene’s form is strictly functional (no trips to the New York Museum of Modern Art for it, I’m afraid). This, depending on your vanity, is either a good thing or a bad thing (or a completely value-neutral thing), but I will leave it to your judgment (and, in any case, is really only made relevant by the introduction of ‘pretty’ drinking bottles). However, it is worth noting that the Nalgene’s durability extends beyond simple brute force to include extreme conditions (too extreme, even, for humans). The company claims that a Nalgene bottle can withstand any temperatures between -100 and 248 degrees Fahrenheit. This gives it a distinctive advantage over the SIGG bottle, which is not especially friendly to extreme heat or cold (owing in part, of course, to the poor insulating properties of aluminum). Subsequently, the Nalgene bottle can be frozen and used by intrepid outdoorsmen for boiling water; the Nalgene’s own lack of insulation makes this a risky prospect too, but then these are risky people. Nevertheless, one can even purchase screw in filters that allow for the easy brewing of coffee or tea. There’s a secondary reason why I wouldn’t recommend this, but that’s for later. It is, also, quite lightweight – not as lightweight as the SIGG, but we are more or less comparing the weight of one feather to, say, a half-dozen feathers here. And – at least compared to the SIGG – quite inexpensive (approximately $10), especially considering that it may very well last for years.
But finally, there’s the wide mouth and the measurement markings, and it’s difficult to overstate the usefulness of these design decisions. The wide mouth provides for not only easy cleaning (the Nalgene is dishwasher safe, as a somewhat-related aside), but makes it rather easy to mix powder drinks (made all the more convenient with measurement markings), add ice cubes, and even store dry goods. It is also the proper size to fit most portable water purifiers. All things considered, then, the Nalgene sure does seem like the idea drinking bottle for the outdoors, adventure-craving type.
Unfortunately, many of the design characteristics that make the Nalgene wide-mouth bottle so useful also predicate a number of drawbacks. How serious these drawbacks are, of course, depends on how seriously you want to take them, especially in regards to the potential health crisis of Bisphenol-A, which is certainly the most pressing concern here. And attempting to predict how consumers will react to this is difficult, because one would broadly presume that Nalgene’s target market exists at the curious intersection of two demographics. Allow me to explain:
Let’s admit, first of all, that – despite their massive popularity with this crowd – that the undergrad-and-soccer-mom set is not Nalgene’s core market. How they’ve managed to convince this audience that they need an indestructible drinking bottle is a whole different matter, but it is one for marketing analysts and not myself (and certainly one which SIGG should be subject to as well). Nevertheless, it seems reasonable to suggest that finding the target audience of the Nalgene is as simple as tracing the product back to its genesis, and discovering who fostered its birth as a consumer product. Perhaps unsurprisingly, that birth can largely be attributed to adventure sports-types who initially co-opted Nalgene’s plastic lab equipment for their own end. And I am going somewhere with this: adventure-sport athletes are probably more likely to take risks than you or I, and so might be unconcerned by the (as yet unproven) possibility of BPA leaching. But at the same time, it seems fair to say that adventure-sports athletes are also more environmentally conscious and concerned about what they put in their bodies than ‘normal’ people are. Which, it’s fair to say, means they might be deterred by the ongoing BPA scare (especially now, as other BPA-free drinking vessels are coming to market). It ultimately becomes an issue of which mindset prevails. And – though I’m sure Nalgene themselves would love to know – I’m not sure that there’s a universal or even internally consistent answer to that question.
For someone like myself, who consumes enough aspartame that I might bleed artificial sweetener if cut, the prospect of residual BPA leaching (if it is in fact just residual) seems – by and large – fairly inconsequential. But your mileage may very. For those unaware, by the by, a brief summary of the charges against polycarbonate (excerpted from my review of the SIGG bottle): there is growing concern that the polycarbonate plastics used by Nalgene (and others) leach chemicals including Bisphenol-A (BPA), which allegedly (and I’m quoting Wikipedia verbatim here) “binds to estrogen receptors, thus altering gene expression” and causes “chromosomal error in cell division called aneuploidy.” Researchers have already speculated, based on early studies, that “if pregnant women are exposed to the estrogen-like properties found in BPA, it may impact female reproductive tract development and the future fertility of female fetuses the mother is carrying." Scary stuff. Kind of, anyway, because evidence that polycarbonate in bottles actually leaches non-trivial amounts of BPA is somewhat mixed.
Concern was great enough that a number of retailers have pulled the polycarbonate bottles from their shelves in late 2007, and that public concern has lead to a preliminary report on BPA by Health Canada (due in May 2008), with the U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA) following suit. Neither, for the time being, considers normal BPA exposure to be hazardous, but it is worth a closer look. And polycarbonate is not exclusive to water bottles (baby bottles, some canned food linings, and electronics use it as well), and the concern seems, therefore, fairly legitimate. Nalgene does sell a polyethylene alternative (one that is ruined by hot water and effectively negates most of polycarbonate’s advantages), but other manufacturers – including Klean Kanteen and the aforementioned SIGG – have used the furor to sneak in under the radar and snatch away lucrative (is it lucrative?) drinking bottle market share, seemingly overnight.
What I do know is that at least one of the Nalgene’s advantages is somewhat tempered by this most recent round of BPA uproar – that is, its usefulness as a vessel for hot liquids. While the company claims that Nalgene bottles don’t leach BPA within designated temperature ranges, there – and maybe it’s just me, reading too much into this – seems to be an unspoken caveat, that perhaps 248 degrees Fahrenheit is no longer considered an appropriate temperature. The reason I suggest this is because a study by the University of Cincinnati found that “when new and used polycarbonate drinking bottles were filled with boiling water and left for 24 hours, concentrations of Bisphenol-A were released at rates up to 55 times more rapidly than occurred with room temperature water.[1]” Indeed, one of the researchers confirms the relevance of the study thusly: "My thought was it was more like mimicking what happens in the alpine world when you're climbing or something, where you could boil your water and dump it in or drink your hot tea in it."
But like the SIGG, that’s not at all. Unlike the SIGG, though, most of my other complaints are fairly minor. While the taste is fairly neutral, there’s still a hint of plastic-ness (one which is difficult to describe). It is indeed stain free, but I certainly have had odour issues, too. Granted, this could be my own fault, but I always clean it thoroughly, and when I take a big whiff of my Nalgene bottle (just two years old), I get nostrils full of milk, apple juice, and faint notes of pink lemonade. The actual shape of the bottle is somewhat cumbersome and unwieldy, even when compared to other drinking bottles of an equivalent volume. And the loop-top cap – although a generally good idea – is poorly executed, given that it’s constructed out of such a (comparatively) cheap plastic. This is especially salient because it’s only by the loop that one can tie the bottle to their person or their bag (some more serious backpackers have personally added a bungee cord or rope to serve this function). And the wide-mouth opening is (also comparatively) difficult to drink from. One has to be careful, lest they be drowned by an onslaught of liquid. Nalgene sells a small plastic insert to solve this problem, but it seems rather silly. And while they also offer a narrow-mouth bottle in an equivalent size, this just obliterates the bottle’s secondary purpose and major advantage: as a store for dry goods. The smartest thing that Nalgene could do – and they haven’t done it yet, to the best of my knowledge – is to pair a wide-mouth bottle with a screw-off, bite-valve sports cap.
And also like with the SIGG, I feel decidedly ambivalent about the Nalgene 1 L (32 oz) Wide Mouth Water Bottle. A cursory glance suggests that – pending the outcome of that Health Canada inquiry – the Nalgene is by far the better value. But for some reason, I can’t full out commit to it. It simply seems most accurate to say that no one has got the drinking bottle idea down perfect just yet. Which seems a remarkably silly thing to say, given that we’re talking about water bottles, but it’s more or less true. And what’s especially funny is that both Nalgene and SIGG are so close to the goal line – it’s just the little things that they need to fix. But in the grand scheme of it all, the little things are often most important.
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[1] – “High temperature boosts leaching of bisphenol A from plastic bottles: study.” CBC.ca. http://www.cbc.ca/cp/health/080130/x013004A.html.
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