Fortunately it's because the kind of people that want to thoughtlessly "ban plastic everywhere" are thankfully not making decisions about our water quality. Th

Fortunately it's because the kind of people that want to thoughtlessly "ban plastic everywhere" are thankfully not making decisions about our water quality. The entire shade-ball program was created to mitigate high levels of bromate which were forming when sunlight interacted with chlorinated water. Bromate is an _actual_ carcinogen; as opposed to the carbon black coating on the shade-balls which is only carcinogenic when inhaled as dust (otherwise the activated charcoal in all those drinking filters would be pretty bad news).