Do you use liquor bottles for decoration? Here's why you should stop
| Jul 1, 2019, 13:37 IST
Who doesn't love using liquor bottles to decorate their homes or personal spaces? These bottles are super vibrant and colourful and make for rather pretty decorative pieces. They can easily help add a pop of colour to any place. However, a new study has found that these colourful props can also be quite dangerous. As per the study, the glass and enamelled decoration on bottles contain high levels of harmful elements including lead and cadmium.
"It has always been a surprise to see such high levels of toxic elements in the products we use on a daily basis. This is just another example of that, and further evidence of harmful elements being unnecessarily used where there are alternatives available. The added potential for these substances to leach into other items during the waste and recycling process is an obvious and additional cause for concern," says an expert.
The researchers also found that all of these harmful elements were present in the glass but in quantities that would not risk the health or the environment. However, when it came to the enamels, the story was quite different. They found cadmium concentrations of up to 20,000 parts per million and lead concentrations up to 80,000ppm in these enamels. If you're wondering how high that is, the limit for lead in consumer paints is 90ppm.
This alone should be reason enough to understand that as pretty as these bottles may appear, the health and environment hazards they pose are too dangerous to be allowed. So, the next time you think of storing a liquor bottle for decoration purposes, think again. Stay tuned for more updates.
"It has always been a surprise to see such high levels of toxic elements in the products we use on a daily basis. This is just another example of that, and further evidence of harmful elements being unnecessarily used where there are alternatives available. The added potential for these substances to leach into other items during the waste and recycling process is an obvious and additional cause for concern," says an expert.
The researchers also found that all of these harmful elements were present in the glass but in quantities that would not risk the health or the environment. However, when it came to the enamels, the story was quite different. They found cadmium concentrations of up to 20,000 parts per million and lead concentrations up to 80,000ppm in these enamels. If you're wondering how high that is, the limit for lead in consumer paints is 90ppm.
This alone should be reason enough to understand that as pretty as these bottles may appear, the health and environment hazards they pose are too dangerous to be allowed. So, the next time you think of storing a liquor bottle for decoration purposes, think again. Stay tuned for more updates.