to me hard white plastic is hard white plastic. I am wrong about any of this?
yes, completely. there are many different types of plastics, and they are definately not always interchangable.
however- the buckets they sell at lowes have been used as fermentors. most are the same type of HDPE plastic as used in milk jugs. the difference between food grade HDPE and regular HDPE is the purity of the plastic.
food grade plastics are required to have lower levels of plasticizers, BPEs, and other contaminants. usually, recycled plastics are not used in food-contact applications due to increased amounts of those chemicals. cheap paint buckets are definately not food grade.
to recycle plastic, old containers are melted down into a mixture. usually its not entirely one type of plastic, but a mixture of several. recycling is not a 100% recovery rate, meaning you dont just melt down 100 bottles and make 100 new bottles out of it. there is some degredation that occurs due to many factors; sometimes the recycled material is more brittle or has less tensile stregnth than desired. in order to get the desired physical characteristics, more plasticizers or other chemicals are added (much less of these additives are needed with new, virgin plastic). these extra chemicals and plasticizers can leech out from the finished product.
if that matters to you (or anyone who drinks your beer), you might want to spend the money on something else. if you dont care- its up to you. if you were distributing your beer to the public, the FDA
would care, and you would not be allowed to use them.
i wouldnt personally use non-food grade plastics if given a choice, but i also wouldnt feel uncomfortable drinking one of your beers, either. i think it would take many years of drinking lots of beer to start becoming dangerous to your health. however if given the chance to cut down on chemical exposure, its always good to err on the side of caution.
