Just out of curiousity, did the article say what kind of plastic and how hot things have to be?

The drip basket on our coffee maker is plastic as well as our microwave dishes and the serving bowls I put the hot food into. I know not all plastic is created equal but I've never heard there's a problem with it.

Val

hot plastic gasses off unhealthy things, doesn't 'leach' them into the contents - if you can "smell plastic", hold your breath, otherwise it's not too important, and the grounds turned out of the machine into a bag won't be hot enuff to make plastic react .... don't think the drip basket of plastic would be ideal but prolly doesn't really get that hot

Bill

here's the url where i found the article.

http://www.jhsph.edu/publichealthnews/articles/halden_dioxins.html

he didn't mention a specific temperature, but did say that using a straw in hot liquids is inadvised for the same reason. those would be, i don't know, in the mid-100 degrees F range.

phthalates are sometimes used to increase the "plasticity" of plastics, i.e., make them less brittle. they're considered environmental pollutants and interfere with endocrinological activity.

Speaking of plastics, I came across this on another post a while back. Interesting. And scary.

Here is a link that might be useful: Plastic Ocean

there seem to be two type of plastic bags that we get here from Starbucks. One is pretty flimsy ("brittle") and the other is very pliable ("plasticky.")

Espresso pucks wouldn't be placed in the bags hot in any event. One store only saves the espresso pucks.

The filters-with-grounds would be warmer, but even then I *think* that the filter is dumped in the trash when a new pot is being brewed - so the old batch may have cooled off a bit.

It's an interesting thing to think about -

I wonder if hot compost gasses phthalates from the bin?

Well, your coffe in that plastic travel mug, styrofoam cup, or plastic lined paper cup are all in contact with hotter liquid that goes directly into your body. That's far more likely to be an issue.

That Starbucks bag held the coffee beans in it before they were used and the bag was reused to hold UCG.

grassman, wow, that plastics article is really something!!! the difficult thing is that even the most well-meaning among us still contributes to the big pollution picture, probably more than we'd like to recognize.

sigh. well, organic gardening is one small thing you can do right, anyway.

Any dioxin in coffee grounds is probably from the paper coffee filters.

All white paper is bleached. Most paper mills use either chlorine or hydrogen peroxide to bleach wood pulp. Chlorine bleaching produced dioxin as a byproduct, but paper mills use it anyway for two reasons. It's cheaper, and the dioxin levels are low enough that they weren't measurable until the 1970's.

If you don't want any dioxin in your coffee, use unbleached coffee filters.

Here is a link that might be useful: Maine's Dioxin problem

After watching NGC the other night I'm a lot more worried about what our planet is doing to itself. They said that the earth was slowly changing to the point that in 3 or 4 hundred million years from now that the earth was going to blow up or something like that. The only bright thing about that was sometime before that, the volcano under Yosemite was going to erupt and would probably destroy life as we know it now, so there wouldn't be any of us here to worry about the catastrophic event that would destroy the earth. But then again, on another NGC show they said the sun was going burn up and leave us in a mess for sure. Now I have all of this to worry about and then I find out that the plastic bags at Starbucks are killing me too. Wow, I hope they don't hear about this because they might start disposing of them in the garbage to keep from getting sued.

I hope Michael Moore doesn't find out about this!!