Question from Deb H.
Debra,
We have a whole house water filter.
After reading your Home Safe Home book on plastics, I’m concerned about the plastic hoses on our hand-held shower handles.
I prefer the hand held shower handles because we can rinse the shower/bathtub walls easily and completely after cleaning them with AFM’s safety bathroom cleaner. Our current shower handles do not have any kind of filter on them.
Are the plastizers, etc leaching into the water that I’m showering in? If I replace them, do you know of a hand held shower handle that does not use a leaching plastic hose? If I buy a hand held shower handle with a filter on it, will the filter filter out the leaching plastics?
I’ll swith back to the old standard shower heads if need be but I sure hate to lose the convenience of the hose type for cleaning.
Debra’s Answer
I think most hand-held shower handles have plastic hoses, but I don’t know what type of plastic is used. If you can call the manufacturer of the brand you have, I can better answer your question.
Without testing the water that comes through, here’s my logic. Since I know heat makes plastic outgas, a lot of the plasticizers that may be present probably have already been released because of the heat of the water. So it would be better to keep using your old one than to get a new one.
If the shower handle had a filter in it, and I think some of them do, I think it would be such a small amount of filter medium that it would do very little. However, since you have a whole-house filter and the filter in the shower handle wouldn’t have to remove other pollutants, it may remove whatever plasticizers may be present.
It’s really really important to remember with plastics that there is a wide wide variety of plastics with very different levels of toxicity. So it’s really important to identify the type of plastic and not assume a danger where there may be none.
Find out the type of plastic and I’ll help you sort this out.
