Last night, I sliced up vegetables on a plastic chopping board. I prodded them with a black plastic spatula as they heated up in the non-stick pan. Later, I put some leftovers in a transparent plastic tub. All pretty normal, even banal, actions for a quiet evening, or so you’d think. But what if this bang-average evening routine is in fact slowly wrecking my health?
Over the last few months, there has been a steady bombardment of news stories and scientific research yelling about the potential dangers of the humble plastic products lurking in our kitchens. The utensils you’re using to stir your food as it warms up? They might be leaching carcinogens into your pasta sauce. Thinking of heating that same pasta sauce in a plastic container in the microwave for your lunch? Think again. Apparently doctors are warning of the potential dementia risk associated with doing just that (I suddenly feel a lot less smug about my batch-cooking habit). And then there are the scary “forever chemicals” that might be hanging out in your old, scratched non-stick pan.
It’s all pretty alarming stuff. And if this is only serving to put you off home cooking, apologies in advance – plastic takeaway containers are another potential villain. Back in February, a study found that eating from them frequently might increase the risk of congestive heart failure by 13 per cent.
So after having a brief existential meltdown about how our kitchens might be full of invisible saboteurs, what is the best course of action? Should we be rounding up all our black utensils and chucking them out, environment be damned? Should we retreat to the forest to adopt an entirely wood-based existence? Is there a realistic way we can try to mitigate the risks, bearing in mind that it’s near-impossible to avoid them completely?
Perhaps the most maligned kitchen item of the moment is the black plastic spatula (or fish slice, or slotted spoon, or indeed anything made from that material that you’re likely to use to move your food around a hot pan). So what makes this particular genre of utensils so bad? In order to break it down, we need to take a closer look at how they’re made.
Automated recycling machines struggle to detect black plastic, because the infra-red lights they use for sorting are absorbed by the dark pigment, so it often ends up in landfill or gets incinerated. But black is a perennially popular colour for kitchen products (perhaps because it’s vaguely minimalist, or because you can easily match it to stuff you already own). And as manufacturers use more recycled materials in their black plastic items, they’ve found themselves in a situation where demand outstrips supply.
They’ve got around that shortfall by resorting to black plastic from electronic waste: appliances such as televisions, computers and coffee machines, to name just a few. All this might sound good in theory – ingeniously eco-friendly, even. But those appliances tend to be treated with fire retardant chemicals in order to stop them from burning up if they overheat. And those chemicals, known as brominated flame retardants, or BFRs, can be toxic to humans; studies have linked them to problems with the endocrine system and cancer. To make things more confusing, it’s often very difficult for shoppers to tell whether their black plastic items originated as e-waste, or whether they are made from new materials.
Last year, research published in the journal Chemosphere analysed more than 200 black plastic products, the sort of things you might commonly expect to find in any home. They found that flame retardant chemicals were present in 85 per cent of the products – and among the items with the highest levels of the chemicals was the humble black spatula. That’s particularly worrying because every time you use it to, say, flip over an omelette or stop your stir fry from catching on the bottom of a pan, the spatula heats up. And that heating process can cause the BFRs to leach out and end up in your dinner. A separate 2018 study previously found that the flame retardants from utensils could transfer into hot cooking oil.
But it’s not just black plastics that are a potential cause for concern. A chopping board that has seen better days, for example, might be shedding microplastics into our food. Same goes for the battered plastic container holding your carefully prepped meals. Microplastics are teeny-tiny fragments of plastic that tend to be invisible to the naked eye, which are pretty much all-pervasive in modern life. They’re in the air, in our food system, in water; you’ve probably already heard about the damage they’re wreaking on the world’s oceans.
“You can see over time that the number of microplastic particles in the environment has increased dramatically,” says Dr Rachel Adams, a reader in cardiovascular biochemistry at Cardiff Metropolitan University, who specialises in toxic particles. “You can plot graphs against the amount of plastic produced and the amount in the environment. So we know there’s a lot of it there.”
Microplastics, Adams adds, have been found in body tissues and even in the brain. If you “ingest them in food”, she says, “you can absorb them”, and the tiny particles can “cross the cell membrane” and build up, because the body has “no mechanism for getting them out”. So, over time, we’re “getting more and more exposed to them”. In fact, the dementia study I mentioned earlier discovered that the average human brain contains as much microplastic as a standard plastic spoon; levels of microplastics were three to five times higher in people diagnosed with dementia. Other studies have highlighted potential issues such as inflammation, increased risk of cardiovascular problems including heart attack or stroke, and disruption to reproductive health.
But when we look beyond the screaming headlines and place this in context, the picture is a bit more nuanced. Yes, Adams says, “Historically, exposure to particles is associated with detrimental health outcomes.” But right now, there aren’t all that many long-term studies exploring the impacts of microplastics (even though it can sometimes seem like scary statistics are omnipresent). “There’s been a few small studies showing, yes, there are detrimental effects,” she notes, but we need more research to properly understand them.
There is, however, “clear evidence” of the health implications associated with the “forever chemicals” in non-stick pans, she says. Non-stick coatings tend to be made from per- and polyfluoroalkyl substances, a group of chemicals more snappily known as PFAS. They repel oil and grease, making them pretty useful in cookware (they’re found in some food packaging, as well as stain-resistant clothing and furniture too). But it can take these chemicals thousands of years to break down (hence the “forever” bit). They’re also “associated with reproductive problems, developmental delays, cancers [and] changes in immune function”, Adams says.
Plus, both PFAS and microplastics are hydrophobic (so they don’t mix with or dissolve in water) so they tend to draw together. “It could mean that microplastics actually take the hydrophobic toxins like PFAS into the body,” Adams adds. “So it could be that exposure to both the PFAS and the microplastics has a sort of synergistic effect. That is a bit of a worry.”
But it’s also very important to put these risks in context. “You’re not going to get rid of your exposure to microplastics by not using plastic utensils,” Adams notes. “People worry about water bottles – should I drink from a plastic water bottle? It might give you a few more microplastics. But there’s already a lot of microplastics in the water in any case.” She adds that “if someone’s really worried about their exposure to microplastic particles” but they’re still, for example, a smoker, then “they need to prioritise stopping smoking if they’re concerned about exposure to particles”.
The best way forward, it seems, is to try and reduce the amount of plastics you’re regularly using without fixating on the very tricky task of banishing them from your life completely. It’s worth prioritising getting rid of the items that tend to be exposed to heat, as this is when the toxic chemicals are most likely to leach out; you can swap your plastic utensils for equivalents made from wood or stainless steel.
If you tend to stick plastic containers in the microwave when you’re warming up your dinner, take the extra few seconds to decant it into a bowl or onto a plate – or you can look out for a glass tub that’s microwave safe (metal containers might look quite chic in your fridge, but for obvious reasons are best kept well away from the microwave). It’s also worth bearing in mind that the heat and friction of a dishwasher can cause plastic to wear down over time, which could release microplastics, too.
Most modern non-stick pans are typically safe for cooking so long as you don’t use them at super-high temperatures and make sure to replace them if the coating gets scratched, as this can expose you to those toxic chemicals. Or, you could look out for PFAS-free cookware (this does tend to be more expensive than your average set of pans). Essentially, it doesn’t have to be about overhauling your lifestyle completely, but about making some clever swaps over time, and keeping a close eye on the life span of your kitchen products. Apologies in advance to my battered black spatula – you’re about to take a one-way trip to the bin.
