Stainless Steel Bottle Recycling or Definitely Not

This image is from a Mom's blog called Raising Natural Kids: https://raisingnaturalkids.com/lead-in-stainless-steel-water-bottles/

There is a growing awareness that the solder used to close most stainless steel vacuum bottles contains lead. I want to quickly state that I'm not raising a safety concern. There is a layer of stainless steel between the water and the bead of lead solder, so you won't be consuming any lead directly, barring some mistake on the manufacturing side. The problem about the solder used to create the vacuum on stainless steel bottles from Buoy's perspective becomes that you've taken stainless steel, which is widely assumed to be perfectly recyclable and you've contaminated it with something that makes the whole bottle very difficult if not impossible to recycle. It also becomes very difficult to maintain the fantasy that anything sustainable is happening to your vacuum bottle at the end of its life. This is true even for non-lead solders.

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Originally published January 25, 2024. Republished here Jan. 2026