Primus makes a steel bottle called the TrailBottle. The body is 18/8 stainless, food grade, which is the same grade you find in a decent pot. The Norwegian retailer Outnorth describes the lid in one line: “Lokket - Tritan® tar verken opp eller avgir smak.” The lid, Tritan, neither takes on nor gives off flavor.
That sentence is a fair description of a lid. It is also a plastic lid, and it is the first thing your mouth meets.
What Tritan is
Tritan is a copolyester made by Eastman. Three monomers go in: dimethyl terephthalate, cyclohexanedimethanol and a cyclobutanediol, according to the summary of its chemistry. Eastman sells it as a BPA-free material for housewares that holds up through hundreds of dishwasher cycles without cracking or crazing.
Both of those things are true, and both are beside the point if you are trying to avoid plastic. BPA-free means the resin was built without bisphenol A. It does not mean the resin is not a plastic. Tritan was built to replace polycarbonate after BPA became a problem, and Nalgene moved its outdoor bottles over in 2008. It is a good plastic. It is still one.
There is an argument about how good. A 2012 paper in Food and Chemical Toxicology reported that the three monomers showed no estrogenic or androgenic activity. A 2013 study in Food Chemistry found small amounts of additives migrating from Tritan bottles into water, well below EU limits. That is a chemistry fight, and I am not going to settle it here. If your reason for skipping plastic is health, read both and decide. If your reason is that you want none, the fight is a sideshow. The lid is plastic either way.
Reading the listing
The word “stainless” on a bottle is a claim about the body. The body is the easy part. A bottle is a body, a closure, a seal and often a loop or a sleeve, and each one is its own material.
Here is what I do with a steel bottle listing, in order:
- Find the word “lid” or “cap” and read what follows it.
- Look for the seal. Steel threads do not seal on their own.
- Look at the colors. A painted bottle is usually powder-coated, and powder coat is plastic.
- If the page never names the lid, treat that as an answer.
The TrailBottle fails on step one. The tether strap between lid and cap, and the inner screw cap, are not described at all on the page we read. That does not matter for the verdict, because the Tritan lid already settles it.
Where it landed
We looked at the Primus TrailBottle 0.6 L and did not list it. It is a good steel bottle with a lid that is a plastic, and the lid ships with it. The retailer we found also shows it as sold out or discontinued, so you may not be able to buy it anyway.
Swapping the lid is the usual escape hatch, and it works if a steel replacement exists. But then you bought a plastic lid first and threw it out, which is a fine thing to do and not the same as buying a plastic-free bottle.
The honest version of this category is short. Steel and glass bodies are everywhere. What is hard is the closure, and the water bottle list is organized around that, with each seal named. Four bottles make it today, all Bronze, and each page says exactly which seal it carries and what we still don’t know about the logo or the finish.
A good steel bottle with a bad lid is a frustrating thing to own, because everything else about it is right. The steel body is built to last for years. The lid is the one part the maker could choose differently without anyone noticing at the shelf, and the one part you actually put to your mouth every day. Buyers who care about plastic should ask about it before they ask about the capacity or the color. That is why I read the lid line first and the capacity line last.
Next time a bottle says steel, scroll past the photo to the sentence about the lid. That sentence is the product.