Dollar Tree: Uh-oh
This evening I discovered the hard way, from the whitish chemical burns on my right hand, that a plastic drinking glass I'd purchased at the local Dollar Tree was emitting peroxides, probably hydrogen peroxide. Now, Dollar Tree promises and delivers a price on everything of $1 or less -- everything a dollar even, except for those you can by two or three or four for a dollar. It's true. Everything in there costs a maximum of one dollar, and sometimes less.
That's good as far as it goes. But a great deal of what they sell in the Dollar Tree comes from Mainland China. That includes numerous items of food, tableware, cookware, paper products of all kinds, and many other things. Some of that is worth buying. But I avoid the food items that come from or were manufactured in China, because they often contain melamine, and I don't want dead kidneys, thank you very much. Ditto the pet food sold there. Ditto certain cleaning compounds -- I vet them all, reading the labels to see what they contain and where they were manufactured and by whom they are distributed, and if they come from China and/or entail a chemical mixture that can be deadly, forget it.
Looks like I'm going to have to add "plastic glassware" to the list. The glass I tossed tonight was originally very pretty, with a design in red, white, and blue of the American flag and similar symbology. I bought it around the 4th of July one year. But the decals containing the design had started to fall apart and fade, and I noticed that water drunk from the glass had this funny taste that reminded me of oxygen therapy, i.e., drops of H2O2 in water I took for health reasons back in 1992, which began to taste the way bleach smells (which is when I quit taking the tonic). And tonight, when I went to pick up the glass after water got on it, it burned my hands exactly the way 3% hydrogen peroxide will. The peroxides weren't necessarily those of hydrogen; they could have been other types of peroxides, and would have produced the same white burns on contact with my skin.
Somebody tell me why plastic glasses are doing this? Maybe it was something from the decals on the outside, but I got that awful chlorine-y taste from water on the inside of the glass, too. So: no more pretty plastic tumblers from Dollar Tree, just glassware. Dammit. Glass breaks, but it doesn't produce lots of hydrogen peroxide. And now that I know what that little kitchen quisling was capable of, no more plastic tableware or tumblers.
That's good as far as it goes. But a great deal of what they sell in the Dollar Tree comes from Mainland China. That includes numerous items of food, tableware, cookware, paper products of all kinds, and many other things. Some of that is worth buying. But I avoid the food items that come from or were manufactured in China, because they often contain melamine, and I don't want dead kidneys, thank you very much. Ditto the pet food sold there. Ditto certain cleaning compounds -- I vet them all, reading the labels to see what they contain and where they were manufactured and by whom they are distributed, and if they come from China and/or entail a chemical mixture that can be deadly, forget it.
Looks like I'm going to have to add "plastic glassware" to the list. The glass I tossed tonight was originally very pretty, with a design in red, white, and blue of the American flag and similar symbology. I bought it around the 4th of July one year. But the decals containing the design had started to fall apart and fade, and I noticed that water drunk from the glass had this funny taste that reminded me of oxygen therapy, i.e., drops of H2O2 in water I took for health reasons back in 1992, which began to taste the way bleach smells (which is when I quit taking the tonic). And tonight, when I went to pick up the glass after water got on it, it burned my hands exactly the way 3% hydrogen peroxide will. The peroxides weren't necessarily those of hydrogen; they could have been other types of peroxides, and would have produced the same white burns on contact with my skin.
Somebody tell me why plastic glasses are doing this? Maybe it was something from the decals on the outside, but I got that awful chlorine-y taste from water on the inside of the glass, too. So: no more pretty plastic tumblers from Dollar Tree, just glassware. Dammit. Glass breaks, but it doesn't produce lots of hydrogen peroxide. And now that I know what that little kitchen quisling was capable of, no more plastic tableware or tumblers.