Lawyers in Gaiam's home state of Colorado filed suit last week seeking class-action status for a lawsuit against Gaiam for BPA in their aluminum water bottles. ZRecs broke the story accusing Gaiam of hiding BPA in their water bottles, followed it up by breaking the story of Gaiam's admission of BPA at far greater levels than SIGG, and have continued to follow the story as Gaiam has released testing data and cleaned up their own website.

After Caddell & Chapman filed its lawsuit against SIGG in October (we also did most of the original reporting on that story), multiple firms' lawyers were racing to be first to bring Gaiam to court, and C&C got beat out. Perhaps as a result of this hasty process, there are a couple of errors in the filing by Chimicles & Tikellis LLP that will need correcting. I'm not sure how that process works, but we'll relay them here rather than contacting the lawyers directly, in order to make it clear that we have had and will continue to have no connection with this lawsuit.

1. The complaint cites Gaiam bottles as containing levels of BPA "ten times larger than the levels of BPA that SIGG reported in its own bottles." In fact, it is approximately ten times larger than the method detection limit used in SIGG's internal testing, which was 2 parts per billion. In those tests, however, SIGG did not show any detectable leaching (i.e. leaching occurred at levels below that testing threshold).


2. Multiple references are made to the bottles being made of stainless steel. They are in fact made of aluminum. Gaiam does also sell stainless steel water bottles, but these are highly unlikely to contain BPA, as stainless steel water bottles do not need to be lined, as aluminum does.

When lawyers come calling...

It's worth taking a moment to outline how we interact with lawyers when they come calling. We believe Gaiam should be held accountable for its deceptive marketing and its executives' refusal to come clean on an issue that was a high consumer priority until we proved beyond any reasonable doubt that they were hiding something. Class action lawsuits are, for better and for worse, the primary forum our government provides for seeing these issues resolved. But participating in that process isn't our role. It wasn't with Carter's, it wasn't with SIGG, and it won't be with Gaiam.

There's even a chance that you could be a loyal reader of Z Recommends and never have heard about the class action lawsuits moving forward against Carter's and SIGG, both of which were filed during the periods in which we aggressively covered the issue. That's because we make a rule of not publishing posts seeking to help firms who are looking for plaintiffs for their lawsuits, or to publish comments from lawyers doing the same. You see, owning an issue like this, which can be lucrative for a business litigation firm, typically centers around which team of lawyers can find a suitable individual or individuals to be named as plaintiffs and get to the courthouse first. There are so many potential conflicts of interest in our allowing them to conduct their search on Z Recommends - not to mention the spam-tinged unpleasantness for our regular readers - that we will never let it happen, even though it means rejecting comments from lawyers who may express a passion for seeing real justice done.

When lawyers contact us, we sometimes discuss information that was provided to us on the record for publication, or which we discovered in our own research. We do not share information that was provided to us off the record, we do not share information relevant to stories we are still developing, and we do not name sources who have requested to remain anonymous.

If you are aware of any other companies we should investigate for their marketing claims or product safety, get in touch with us. Our email address is editors (at) zrecs (dot) com.