3 Best Stainless Steel Water Bottles (For Years of Reuse)

3 Best Stainless Steel Water Bottles

Now you’ve had a read of the multiple benefits, you’ll be wanting to know where you can buy a stainless steel bottle from.

Thankfully, there are many online eco shops stocking sustainable, environmentally friendly products.

Here are my 3 recommendations for the best stainless steel water bottles.

1. Mintie Water Bottle

Mintie started off with stainless steel lunch boxes but they’ve since expanded their range into lunch bags, accessories and stainless steel bottles.

They stock a variety of stylish and sustainable bottles, including kids stainless steel water bottles.

2. Global WakeCup

This is the bottle I’ve been using for years and I’d highly recommend it. I’ve got the non-insulated version which is absolutely fine and inherently uses less materials – just stainless steel!

Global WakeCup are also a company with their heart in the right place.

3. Bambaw Steel Bottle

Bambaw are a great company producing plastic-free and zero waste items.

You can buy all sorts of Bambaw products including on the go, beauty, and home and kitchen. Their stainless steel water bottles are great and very affordable.

Why swap your plastic bottle for a stainless steel bottle?

If you’re the owner of a plastic water bottle or buy single use bottles regularly from the shop, I urge to ditch the plastic and single use items and swap in one of the best stainless steel water bottles.

Choosing stainless steel is a more sustainable and eco-friendly option that will help reduce your environmental footprint. It’s intensive to make initially, but it’s a good sustainable material thereafter.

It’s not just the environment either, you’ll personal health can benefit too. Even just owning a reusable water bottle and having it with you can promote healthy habits as it encourages you drink more water on a regularly basis.

So, if you need a nudge to stop buying plastic bottles or have been itching to buy a reusable metal bottle but don’t know what type, let’s take a look at the benefits of these bottles before heading into the best stainless steel water bottles on the market.

Picture above showing my Global WAKEcup stainless steel bottle in the gym. I’ve used this every day for years and it’s still as good as new, aside from a few dints and scratches which add a bit of character for me.

15 Benefits of Stainless Steel Water Bottles

The below list contains stainless steel water bottle benefits that are a mixture of environmental reasons, practical and even health benefits.

1. Highly reusable and durable

A good stainless steel water bottle is likely to last for a decade or more. And all without deteriorating in quality. The same goes for stainless steel lunch boxes and other products.

There are very good reasons why steel is used to hold buildings up, because it’s incredible strong and it lasts ages! The same reason why stainless steel water bottles are a must-have item for explorers and even army personnel.

Other water bottle materials don’t come close to steel’s durability. Although glass is a good environmental choice, but is very liable to break if you drop it. With all the environmental problems of plastic, it’s also likely to decrease in quality as it’s used and is prone to cracking and splitting.

A stainless steel water bottle has none of these issues. It won’t break, won’t crack and won’t decrease in quality.

2. 100% recyclable

Your stainless steel water bottle will last you years and years, but when it is time for your bottle to be retired, you can relax in the knowledge that a stainless steel water bottle is 100% recyclable.

In fact, the recyclability of stainless steel is so good that it can be infinitely recycled without losing any quality as it goes from old product to new product. This differs quite drastically to plastic and silicone, which do not retain the same qualities as the original material meaning their use becomes fairly limited once recycled.

This is great news for the environment as it gives stainless steel a high intrinsic worth meaning less is likely to be wasted by people and end up in landfill, in oceans and in nature.

In the UK, around 96% of stainless steel is recycled.

3. 80% of new stainless steel is made using recycled content

According to the International Stainless Steel Forum, a non-profit research organisation, 80% of all new stainless steel is made using recycled scrap metal. And this total is increasing each year.

Of course, reusing an existing resource is a pillar of sustainability as it drastically reduces the need to mine new raw materials, which in the case of stainless steel would be mainly iron ore.

As you learnt in point 2, recycled stainless steel retains all its original characteristics. So there is no difference in quality between a stainless steel bottle made from raw materials and one made from recycled steel – brilliant news allowing people to easily buy more sustainable stainless steel.

Even better, stainless steel made from recycled material can be produced with electricity, which as you know can be easily generated with renewable energy sources. With recycled steel there is no need for any fossil fuel use, helping you to reduce your carbon footprint!

4. Corrosion resistant

Stainless steel is called stainless for a reason – it does not rust.

This is thanks to the addition of chromium during the production process, which forms a layer of chromium oxide on the material surface and protects the steel underneath. If there was no chromium in the alloy mixture, the iron content would gladly react with the oxygen in the air and form iron oxide aka rust.  

5. Completely unreactive

Being completely inert, or unreactive, stainless steel packs a number of benefits for both personal health and environmental reasons.

By not reacting with anything, it means stainless steel is incredibly durable. There aren’t many natural conditions on earth that can break stainless steel down, allowing it to last so long.

This firstly means you’re water bottle will last for a long time.

Secondly, a great health benefit is that stainless steel doesn’t leach out any harmful substances when in contact with water, air or soil. For you, this means that your drink inside remains pure and untainted, unlike say a plastic water bottle.

If stainless steel does somehow come to be in an environment where it shouldn’t (e.g. in the ocean), its unreactive characteristic has both pros and cons. The pro is that it won’t cause any additional harm by releasing toxins or degrading into microplastics and microfibres that go on to cause serious problems for ecosystems.

The con is that the stainless steel will persists in the environment where it shouldn’t be in the first place. Thanks to the excellent recycling rates, we sincerely hope this scenario is a rarity.

6. Easily cleaned and sterilised

Stainless steel’s fantastic cleanability is the main reasons why it’s the go-to material for professional kitchens in the food and drink industry, as well as hospitals.

Stainless steel is very easy to sterilise, primarily thanks to the chromium layer on top that stops rust forming and can self-repair scratches. The nature of the material also means that it doesn’t easily harbour bacteria and mould, giving it good, inherent anti-microbial resistant properties.

Contrast this to a plastic water bottle, which is prone to forming mould and other non-desirable microorganisms under the cap and on the inside of the bottle. You will not get this on a stainless steel water bottle.  

As well as traditional washing up liquid and water, a stainless steel water bottle is generally dishwasher safe. Have a look here on how to clean a stainless steel bottle.

7. Your water stays cold

A standard stainless steel water bottle without insulation, like my Global WAKEcup water bottle, will keep your water cold for around 4 hours. More than enough time for most activities or as long as it takes you to drink about 750ml of water.

If you have a stainless steel bottle that is insulated, then your drink inside can stay cold for up to 24 hours. This is how the Chilly bottles work for example – they are stainless steel on the inside, then wrapped in a layer of insulation.

8. Much, much cheaper buying water every day

A good stainless steel water bottle is a very small investment. Around the £20 mark will get you a good quality bottle.

To put that in real terms though, if you reuse your water bottle and fill it up just once a day for a month, it would have more than paid for itself already by the time you’ve bought a new bottle of water every other day.  

9. It’s a time saver

Just fill your bottle up straight from the tap, or with some nice pre-chilled fridge water if you’re like me, and you’re good to go.

This measure stops unnecessary trips to the shop to by a single-use bottle (and whatever else you may be tempted to by while you’re in there!). I realise this isn’t too much of a hassle as a one off, but going to the shop every day to buy a bottle of water just doesn’t make sense.

A reusable water bottle always tends to be a bit bigger than your usual single use plastic one too.

10. Does not leach out any harmful chemicals

Thanks to stainless steels lack of chemical reactivity, you don’t have to worry about harmful chemicals and toxins being transferred from material container, to your drink and into your body.

The main chemical that has come under enormous fire is BPA, or bisphenol-A. BPA is a synthetic industrial compound found in many plastics, including water bottles, but is now restricted in the EU and other places around the world due to its potential harmful effects on the body.

Many plastic water bottles are now labelled as BPA-free. However, studies have shown that plastic can release all sorts of potentially nasty chemicals into food and drink that it comes into contact with.

One way to avoid all this is to use a stainless steel water bottle. Thanks to the properties of stainless steel, you can be rest assured that it won’t be releasing any toxins and is overall a much safer choice.  

11. Does not impact the taste of the drink inside

There are two main reasons for this – firstly, stainless steel isn’t porous (unlike plastic) and secondly, it’s a non-reactive material.

I used to use a reusable plastic water bottle and would sometimes squeeze and put half a lemon in there. Even when I thoroughly washed this water bottle out, there was always a tinge of plasticky lemon in their that tainted each drink thereafter. Not pleasant.

And this was all because plastic is porous, can harbour bacteria and can react with the contents of the liquid on a micro-level.

The fantastic thing about a stainless steel water bottle is that it will not react with your drink at all. I’ve tried lemon in my stainless steel bottle and followed it up with just water and each drink tastes exactly as it should! Beautiful.

12. You always have good quality water to hand

I’m one of those people who feels a bit lost when I haven’t got water to hand.

Whether I’m in the car, on my bike, at the gym, on a walk or have gone out on a trip for the day, I feel so much more comfortable just knowing that I have some water close by.

Even better when I know it’s good quality water that’ll be nice and cold in my stainless steel water bottle.

13. Reduces the sheer amount of plastic in circulation

Unfortunately for the environment, the UK along with the US, produce more plastic waste per person than in any other major country in the world. In the UK, per person plastic waste per year weighs in at 99kg.

Looking at plastic water bottle use, the average person in the UK uses 150 single use plastic water bottles each year. Scale this up and it’s a scary 7.7 billion bottles for the whole country. Of course, many of these end up in landfill, or worse discarded for the environment to deal with.

And we’ve not even considered how much crude oil and fossil-fuel powered energy is required to make all that plastic in the first place.

A reusable stainless steel water bottle really will help cut down plastic water bottle use. As we’ve already seen, stainless steel is also more environmentally friendly to produce, is 100% recyclable and is just as useful as a secondary material.

14. You’ll drink more water!

Although it’s ‘just’ a water bottle, you can become strangely attached to your stainless steel bottle.

The benefit of this is that it’s a good thing! Carrying around your water bottle means you’ll be more inclined to drink water on a regular basis.

And drinking more water has been scientifically linked to lots of great health benefits. From maintaining normal blood pressure and digestive functioning to good skin conditioning, mental health benefits and brain functioning, water is could not be any more important. You can read more on the benefits of drinking water here.

15. Stainless steel water bottles are stylish

I’ve saved the aesthetics till last and they’re probably the least important, but important to some people nonetheless.

I personally love the look of my plain, sleek and solid stainless steel water bottle. The little dints it’s picked up since I’ve been using it just add to the character.

You can of course get personalised bottles, patterns, different colours and sleeve materials such as bamboo to make your bottle your own. People can like to be seen with a stylish water bottle whether it’s at the gym or on a walk.

If it means you’ll reuse it more often instead of buying single use bottles, then that’s good news to me.

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Frequently Asked Questions

Here are a few quick fire frequently asked questions on stainless steel water bottles in case they haven’t been covered already.

Wrap up on the best stainless steel water bottles

I hope those 15 benefits have swayed you to make your next water bottle a reusable stainless steel one.

For a tiny initial investment, you’ll get a really good quality water bottle that will last you years, save you money, help improve your health and establish healthier habits! There aren’t many products that will do all that for you.

If that wasn’t enough, stainless steel is also a fine environmentally friendly choice. It is 100% recyclable and 80% of all new stainless steel is made with recycled content which is powered by electricity instead of fossil fuels.

So, next time you’re heading to work, out for the day, to the gym or even working from home, don’t forget your stainless steel water bottle and the benefits it will bring.

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