Purging the plastics

My new mission in life these days is to eliminate all the plastics from my house. In case you somehow missed all the commotion, recently there has been a great deal of concern over the issue of BPA (bis-phenol A) and phthalates in plastics. Chemicals such as BPA and phthalates can leach out of plastics into any foods that they come into contact with and thus enter our body.
So I did some research on BPA and the two most important facts I found out right away were
1. BPA was first investigated as an estrogen mimic
2. It forms a plastic (polycarbonate) on polymerizing. But the plastic is unstable and degrades easily and leaches out the BPA.

Is it just me or does using BPA/polycarbonate in food storage, bottles etc sound like a recipe for disaster? But BPA is widely used in baby bottles, water bottles, juice bottles, lining of food cans, food wrap and even as a plastic coating for children's teeth to prevent cavities – go figure!
Heating, washing, reusing, scratches all can cause the plastic to degrade and increase the amount of BPA that leaches out of the polycarbonate container. In fact a study showed that adding boiling water to a polycarbonate bottle can cause 55 times more BPA to leach out! So parents, if you sterilize your baby's polycarbonate bottles in the microwave or with boiling water, you may actually be increasing your baby's exposure to BPA!
BPA is an endocrine disruptor and has been linked to infertility. BPA also affects brain development in children and is linked to breast cancer and may even induce insulin resistance. So definitely nothing you want coming in contact with your little ones.
How to tell if it has BPA – Simple rule of thumb - Almost any clear, hard plastic bottle is polycarbonate. Example - Avent bottles or Nalgene bottles.
Eliminating plastics from our lives here is harder than I thought – it's so ingrained in the American culture. Every time you put hot mac and cheese on your kiddo’s cute plate with the licensed character or microwave food stored in a plastic container or drink water out of a plastic bottle, you are exposed to the chemicals in the plastics.
Growing up in India, we rarely, if ever used plastics. Our good old standby for pots, pans and plates was stainless steel. Stainless steel remains the material of choice even today in India. On a recent visit home, I brought back some pots and pans used by my grandma! Stainless lasts forever and has (as yet) no issues of harmful chemicals involved in the manufacture. It really makes me wonder how many of the fertility problems that seem to affect American women are caused by exposure to plastics. I would be curious to see a comparison of infertility rates in Indian women and American women and if they can correlate it to plastics usage.
Other safe alternatives include ceramics and glass. I prefer stainless steel because my daughter still likes to throw things around experimentally (can't wait till she outgrows this stage!) and the glass and ceramics wouldn't stand up to that.
I also found some decent alternatives to the plastic sippy-cup without which every parent's life would be a misery (at least mine would LOL) – the Klean Kanteen, Funtainers, Thermos Foogo and the Safe Sippy. I recently bought some Sigg bottles but they are lined with some chemical material to prevent leaching. This makes me nervous (especially since they don't disclose what the lining is made of), so I'm on the lookout for the Thermos Foogo as the next option.