A simple math error sparked a panic about black plastic kitchen utensils
nationalpost.com
nationalpost.com
475 points, 845 comments, 42 days ago https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41996156
==== From the article:
“However, it is important to note that this does not impact our results,” Liu told National Post. “The levels of flame retardants that we found in black plastic household items are still of high concern, and our recommendations remain the same.”
So if you’re keen on eliminating these chemicals in any amount, chucking the black plastic kitchenware is a start, even if not as effective as the erroneous calculation suggests.
What's the basis for this conclusion, aside from taking the original study's author statements at face value? Someone else replied to the study[1] and characterized it as
>Based on a worst-case scenario, you may be getting nanograms (billionths of a gram) of bromine or lead from your spatula, which is lower than the amount that you get from eating fresh fruit
I did a quick skim of the atlantic article[2] and noticed that mentions of exposure thresholds were strangely absent, despite the pains they took to mention how those toxic substances were in the plastics, and how they caused harm.
[1] https://www.threads.net/@gidmkhealthnerd/post/DBxbQERykRx?hl...
[2] https://www.theatlantic.com/health/archive/2024/10/black-pla...
You're probably ingesting all of that on a daily basis already, even without black utensils. Without a sense of scale, it's impossible to make a rational determination on what to do next. PFAS is in tap water as well. Should you stop drinking water?
Eliminating known sources of contamination by (1) using safer utensils or (2) using water filters are straightforward steps that decrease the amount of these harmful chemicals you consume.
Even if we can’t quantify the exact benefit to the last decimal place, making such changes generally comes at low cost and might offer meaningful advantages over time. Why not err on the side of caution when the trade-offs are so small and the potential health benefits may be substantial?
At least most stainless steel has low leachate levels, it seems like cheap/scrap stainless steel is the biggest offender.
That’s mostly because acidic foods will accelerate corrosion and the patina forms a bunch of tough to clean nooks and crannies for bacteria to fester. It’s more about the risk of food poisoning than anything leaching into food (although zinc can leach into food from brass).
The study you referenced does confirm the findings for aluminum and brass, but it also notes that no stainless steel cookware tested released enough lead to exceed childhood or adult Interim Reference Levels (IRLs). The testing involved placing vinegar—an acidic substance—and leaving it there for 24 hours, yet even under these conditions, stainless steel did not surpass IRL thresholds for lead.
I think what you are saying here is that avoidance of lead even below threshold is important and that plastic or silicone could have even lower amounts of lead in it. Which is fair and I think important to realize there is no perfect answer here.
From a usability and quality perspective I would suspect that many on HN could afford the marginally more expensive, higher-end alternatives that will last longer anyway.
The idea that we should have ever turned recycled electronics, tires, and other non-food safe materials into food related implements has always been dubious on its face. It’s a scourge.
Source, please. Drinking one gallon of water a day is perfectly safe. Drinking 10 is not. 500 mg of acetaminophen is fine, 5 grams is not. 2 beers is reasonable, 20 is not. Factors of ten are pretty large safety margins.
Also, different substances follow different safety curves. A 10x difference in acetaminophen takes you from very safe to very dangerous. A 10x difference in lead takes you from less dangerous to more dangerous; there isn't a "safe" dosage of lead.
e.g. There could be some effect via a delayed chain reaction process that takes decade to accumulate to be noticeable...
Low quantities of lead have exactly the long term low-dose exposure effects you describe. They have been identified.
There are thousands of articles showing levels of acetaminophen that do, and do not, cause hepatotoxicity. Here are all of them:
https://scholar.google.com/scholar?hl=en&as_sdt=0%2C38&q=ace...
This isn't new, here's an article from a half century ago discussing exactly this: https://www.researchgate.net/profile/Barry-Rumack/publicatio...
If what you've been shown so far is insufficient evidence for you, then I'm afraid you're on your own. I don't need to play the "how about this" moving goalpost game.
This seems like a non sequitor, Why does your opinion of which ‘games’ allegedly exist, or not, matter?
It doesn’t seem possible for your written opinions to ever outweigh any other HN user’s…?
Why does your opinion on ‘games’, in any comment whatsoever, matter more than any other HN user’s?
Can you answer the previous questions?
Hence why I asked a followup question in the first place…?
We're discussing my choice of actions. Doing your research for you, or answering your questions.
My satisfaction is far, far, far, far more important than yours when it comes to my choice of action.
I can’t even imagine a scenario where it would matter, other than if you got to control whether other users can click the reply button or not.
Edit: You may choose to ignore, deflect, or just leave, but the questions, and the button, will still be there regardless.
It’s still unclear why any of your ‘say so’ even matters more than my ‘say so’.
There is no known safe dosage of lead.
If you are able to detect lead intake in a person, and are unable to detect harm in that person attributable to that lead, that would be news to the scientific community and you should publish it.
From those two comments I feel obliged* to point out that one atom of lead - or indeed one atom of any element - is really a very, very, very small quantity...
A quick refresh on just how many atoms an element there are in one gram of that element might be in order.
> There is no known safe dosage of lead
I'd happily ingest a lead atom if you can prepare one for me.
Q: Is there a safe known dosage of ionizing radiation? I ask because I'm flying later today...
[* full disclosure, Chemistry PhD]
Identifying a single lead atom, and measuring harm caused by ingesting a single lead atom, are beyond the capability of our tools at the moment.
You can form a hypothesis that one atom would cause no harm, I can form one otherwise, but until we're able to quantify that then these are just hypotheses.
Among lead levels we are able to detect and measure the quantity of, there's no known safe level. And there very well may be points below which the harm caused, is so small that it's some people consider it an acceptable risk, as with your airplane and radiation example.
A typical person seems to breath between 8-9 cubic meters of air per day. So 1.2-1.3 micrograms of lead per day via oral inhalation seems perfectly fine per the EPA.
And the body does excrete lead, just slowly.
actual zero anything is nonsensical in the real world.
Doesn't matter to the point I was making which is that a factor of ten is significant enough that you can't just assume what happens at X level means the same for 1/10th of it or 10x it.
They like steel and glass kitchenware only. I guess that makes me a crunchy dad (at least when it comes to the kitchen): with any type of plastic, we don't really know what it's really going to do to you long term. Might be nothing at all, but it might be lots of really bad things. But with steel and lead-free glass? It just sits there doing its job for decades on end, no leaching, no reacting, no bits of microplastic in the cooking.
If I saved up the money I spent on non-stick pans, I could've bought several sets of good steel ones, each of which will outlast me. Same goes for steel spatulas.
I was in a restaurant the other day and a friend pointed out a small chip on a pint glass. They mentioned that many people take their glass cups and scoop ice out of an ice drawer which can result in small glass shards to be ejected into the ice drawer (and thus ice) which would be very, very bad to ingest.
It might be obvious, but probably best to avoid ice scooping with glass cups!
Well, except for leaded glass.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lead_glass
"Several studies have demonstrated that serving food or drink in glassware containing lead oxide can cause lead to leach into the contents, even when the glassware has not been used for storage."
As someone who lived in Europe for a while, I am completely mystified about this obsession with ice in every drink.
When I was young and didn't have disposable income and consequently cheap, I skipped the ice because it simply reduced your available drink quantity and it watered down your soda.
Source: ER doctor when I checked myself in after discovering I accidentally ate glass. He was right. Nothing happened. I was fine.
It's just uncommon in a commercial kitchen because it costs 4-5x the price, depending on how many you want and how many you'll destroy from use over time. A cheap steel implement in a commercial kitchen will last 4-5x the lifetime of a wood one but that same wood implement will last just fine in a home kitchen.
If you are using wood to avoid plastic but coat your wood in polyurethane or any other fossil fuel based compound, I kind of feel like you’ve gone full circle back to consuming plastic.
Wood cutting boards ("butcher's blocks") have been a popular item for as long as the profession of butcher has been around and longer.
Washing wood utensils immediately after use, with some soap if needed, and drying quickly and completely, should eliminate 99%+ of the risk.
I just prefer no plastic in my food, or in my body. This shouldn't be "crunchy", it should be common sense.
The black plastic spatula entered the trash bin a while ago. I was not sorry to see it go at all.
We also replaced our plastic tooth brushes, and have been using bamboo/natural fiber tooth brushes. They work great. I did this before microplastics started making the news, it was just common sense to me. Just think about the abrasiveness of brushing teeth, and tiny micro-sized pieces of plastic from the brushes shearing off as they grind on your teeth.
The earliest I know of is Adam Ragusea.
It's interesting that we routinely dismiss studies funded by corporations as "biased" and "junk science", but never seem to scrutinize studies from other such advocacy groups. With a name like "Toxic-Free Future" it seems pretty obvious to me what their conclusions were going to be even before the study was done. Not because of nefarious reasons, but because confirmation bias is a difficult thing to overcome.
At least they corrected it instead of just letting it linger out there
The only real approach here is to scrutinize everything and always be especially critical when someone comes up with something that sounds drastic.
Next is that any utensil manufacturers easily has the ability to change the colour and slap on that eco marketing. There is barely any financial incentive for Big White Utensil Co to go and pay scientists to slag off black plastic.
The typo is really unfortunate. But wouldn't anyone be glad to know that black plastics have more of a toxic chemical than white ones? Even if both are below a threshold, I'd like to keep my toxin consumption as low as conveniently possible, maybe nothing will happen to me either way but spatulas are like 10 bucks
Why wouldn't anyone be able to do that? If you can verify the research, you can do whatever you want. Just don't fall for newspapers and blogspam, which also goad you into these things because that is literally how they make money. That way we're not even talking about the actual industry behind it.
Somehow we all got convinced that teflon and complex polymers were solving a problem... It's simply not true.
It takes a combination of seasoning and temp setting to get something approaching nonstick, but if we're being honest, it's still not quite as slippery as Teflon. For most people though, I think it gets good enough.
That's exactly what I read everywhere before buying the pans a couple years ago, I was fully expecting things to stick a lot but somehow never had issues...
I have stainless steel pans and have never experienced this.
Stainless steel pans are not seasoned, but can still be relatively non-stick as long as they are heated properly prior to use. Heating them closes the pores in the pan's surface, making the surface smoother. Add oil after the pan is properly heated. This youtube video explains the process: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CB-SCA1reqE&t=1s
The video just shows a nice hot pan with oil in it, no matter the pan's made of, under those conditions of course stuff isn't gonna stick.
The water glides across the pan due to the Leidenfrost effect. That’s the point when you add the oil.
I suspect there are some truisms involved here, but the common wisdom is that there is a combination of contractions in microscopic imperfections of the surface of the pan from the heat (more accurately, expansion causing the gaps to close) and the laidenfrost effect keeping the food from sticking once the pan has reached sufficient temperature.
Regardless of the true mechanism, my own experience suggests that most complaints about sticking with stainless steel can be avoided by properly heating the pan before adding the oil and food.
For what it’s worth, here is one manufacturer referencing a porous surface:
https://www.heritagesteel.us/pages/cooking-techniques#:~:tex....
It seems you take issue with calling it non-stick when oil is involved? To that end, sure, Teflon-like pans beat everything. But I don’t know many people cooking without oil even in Teflon-like pans.
When people say that properly heating a stainless steel pan will allow non-stick cooking there is certainly an implied asterisk involved re: oil. That’s because it is in direct contrast to a cold stainless steel pan which will cause foods to stick even with oil.
I also mostly use stainless steel, carbon steel and enameled cast iron pans, but do still occasionally reach for the non-stick for more sensitive things like an omelettes.
It's only carbon steel and cast iron that can be seasoned and then don't stick much. It's still not as magic as teflon but it's pretty good with a level of care/practice that isn't too high.
Stainless is totally different and is really only good for sauces not frying, because it sticks worse than anything else.
"sauces" does also sometimes mean frying and sticking, but only as a first step and then liquid is added which takes up and uses the stuck carmelized bits. And that ends up making the pan easier to clean later as the stuck bits are loosened and dissolved by the following sauce.
Those same sorts of things, especially anything tomato or lemon, would actually not be so great in cast iron because it eats away the seasoning. So different pans for different jobs.
I totally love my stainless tho.
Even 2.5ml of oil and 2.5ml of butter mixed together will result in eggs that flip perfectly and taste 100x better than teflon eggs.
There's plenty of things you can cook without fat in a stainless steel, too (pretty much all meats).
And fat isn't just for nonstickiness properties, it's a part of making food taste good. If you want/need to avoid fat for health reasons, that's fair.
You also just can't sear in a teflon, as you're not supposed to preheat the pan.
I almost never reach for my teflon for the opposite reason as you: I find it more effort. The one thing I really use it for is fried eggs, or when I really can't be bothered to wait a few mins for the stainless to preheat
But what is it gonna do? The teflon isn't gonna do anything, maybe the binders/glue, but aslong as there's no new discoveries...
Personally, a touch of avocado oil in a coast iron is much (much) lower risk (and price) than taking bets on whether this particular PFAS matrix will see the same fate as all the prior (now banned) ones or if we have somehow finally solved PFAS once and for all.
Not to mention all the known-bad environmental PFAS’s the manufacture and disposal of these 2 year pans creates.
Also, there's almost never a good reason to be so extremely strict about fat consumption that 5ml or 10ml or 15ml is a problem, especially if you're eating eggs in the first place. If your diet is that strict, boil the egg. The old studies linking fat to heart disease are complete bunk.
I can't imagine this being true for any holistic metric "taste". The only way is if you used some contrived measure like "amount of caramelized particles from frying pan" (in which there's 0 from teflon pan and non-zero from butter eggs, so it's infinitely better), or you use a non-linear scale (eg. slightly better = 10x, slightly better than that = 100x, etc.)
>The old studies linking fat to heart disease are complete bunk.
Fats are at the very least, calorific. And studies showing weight gain to all cause mortality are robust. According to the USDA a tablespoon of butter is 100 calories. An egg on the other hand is 155. Even if you use some optimistic estimates (eg. 3 eggs, half the butter remains on the pan), that's still 10% extra calories. I'd rather spend my calorie budget on other delicious things than slightly more buttery fried eggs.
Also, calories is why you're eating in the first place. The butter is part of the breakfast. If you're getting fat, that's not the fault of the butter per se, but of all the calories put together, and plain chicken breasts are a better option.
Your last comment: >there's almost never a good reason to be so extremely strict about fat consumption that 5ml or 10ml or 15ml is a problem
Which one is it? Is butter/fat usage something you need to watch out for, or does it not matter so you don't have to watch it?
>If you're getting fat, that's not the fault of the butter per se, but of all the calories put together
That might be true, but it's still fair game to single out cooking oils for something that needs to be reduced. A can of coke (140 calories) is only 7% of your daily recommended intake, but it'd be absurd to recommend leaving it in someone's diet, or claim "it's almost never a good reason to be so extremely strict about your diet that 1 can of coke a day is a problem". If anything, you should be prioritizing the can of coke vs cooking oils. A can (or even half) provides a distinct experience in your diet, whereas adding butter only makes your eggs taste slightly more buttery.
> and plain chicken breasts are a better option.
so... boiled chicken breasts? I'll stick with my teflon pan, thanks.
Butter (and fat in general) is very satiating compared to other calorie sources.
Shifting more calories to fat can make it much easier to eat fewer calories overall.
A tablespoon of butter (or olive oil) is roughly 100 calories, which is about 15% of a meal. It’s _roughly_ equivalent to 10 minutes of moderate exercise running.
If you have one fried egg in a tbsp of oil and a slice of toast, the oil is half the calories of the snack.
> The old studies linking fat to heart disease are complete bunk
I’m going to need a source in that wild claim. We definitely know that it was overblown, and the cure (let’s put sugar in instead of fat) might have been worse than what it prevented, but I don’t think there’s any doubt of the consensus that saturated fats in particular (one tbsp of butter is _about_ 40% of your guideline saturated fat in a balanced diet).
You're mischaracterizing those studies. The role of saturated fat in heart disease is not bunk. Eat unsaturated fat.
Ok, convert me:
What is "wok hei," and why can't you get it in a Teflon pan?
That being said, you don't need to be using gas. It is possible to get good wok hei on an induction wok, despite what the foodie peanut gallery says. Not on a 120V unit, though. You need to use a commercial multi-kilowatt setup.
The risks of ceramic coatings less so, but still concerning: https://foodpackagingforum.org/news/nanoparticles-released-b...
Either way, neither is safe for higher heat cooking. At the very least, ceramics will rapidly degrade if used for such.
In fact if you have birds, it’s best to not have teflon at all, because they are so sensitive to teflon fume poisoning: https://beaknwings.org/wp-content/uploads/2021/07/Teflon-Tox...
You do not want to expose Teflon pans to high temperatures because it can degrade the non-stick coating. This is why most woks are made of carbon steel, which work fine over a large flame.
Note: if you're stuck with an induction stove (like I am) you're not going to get wok hei even at the highest setting. It's possible to cheat with a butane torch, or by taking it outside with an outdoor wok burner.
Lower temperatures I typically use for reheating or for sauces.
Perhaps these are the only exceptions. For some of us that have grown up being taught the importance of sorting your trash for the bins by school and TV, it might feel like a betrayal. I would actually like to know the average percentage of the content of domestic recycling bins that the entities on the other side bother to see recycled.
That is very true. The sorting used near-infrared which struggle to detect these black plastics because the carbon black pigments absorb the light. I've quoted information from one our our suppliers which explains it and what they are doing about it.
What is carbon black and why should it be eliminated?
Carbon black is a pigment widely used in
many materials to achieve dark and opaque
colours. However, it poses a problem in sorting
centers. Indeed, for packaging to be sorted
correctly, it must be detected by a sensor
known as "near-infrared," abbreviated as NIR.
This sensor detects the type of polymer by
identifying bright spots on the surface of the
packaging and identifies the range of light
reflected from the majority of the polymer.
However, the presence of carbon black
prevents the packaging from being detected
because it absorbs the infrared rays emitted
by the device. Undetected packaging is
therefore not sorted and subsequently not
recycled. It will be rejected and sent for
incineration or landfill.
As part of the AGEC (The Anti-Waste Law
for a Circular Economy) law, voluntary
commitments have been made by various
stakeholders, including the GUILLIN Group.
We have developed solutions for PP and PET
with detectable packaging without carbon
black. This solution involves eliminating black
dyes in favour of dark dyes validated by
COTREP (Center of Resources and Expertise
on Household Plastic Packaging Recyclability
in France). With this material, our packaging
is detectable by optical sorting and can
therefore be recycled. Some of our ranges are
also available in transparent or translucent
versions, giving you additional options.The EU, and UK, recently brought in legislation where the bottle caps are tethered to the bottle. The main reason is to reduce littering, but it does also make recycling easier.
https://phys.org/news/2024-10-plastic-bottles-eu-caps.html
> I would actually like to know the average percentage of the content of domestic recycling bins that the entities on the other side bother to see recycled.
https://commonslibrary.parliament.uk/research-briefings/cbp-...
"An estimated 73% of the plastic bottles produced in 2020/21 were collected from households for recycling. The rate was 47% for pots, tubs and trays and much lower for plastic film at just 4%."
But I don’t want 8% exposure either if it’s avoidable
(I don't know how true that actually is, perhaps mice show effects faster, but this is one of the reasons I'm dubious about the value of animal testing even if we don't have much better methods available yet).
Every software calculator I could think of to try understands this notation, it's easy to say and copy-paste, and the unit is clear from the context the original number is in.
Binary logarithms are much more useful. Even when you are not using any automatic computer, but you are only doing computations in your head, binary logarithms are more convenient. Moreover, the inter-conversion between binary logarithms and decimal logarithms is very easy to do mentally, by the approximate rule that 10 units of binary logarithms match 3 units of decimal logarithms.
> You can put every quantity in the world on a scale from -10 to +10, where 0 is human-scale, and every number higher means 10x more
> [...], and ↑9 is the Sun. It doesn’t get much bigger than that unless you’re doing astrophysics.
So, which one is it?
Thanks for the comment, I appreciate your willingness to share your disdain!
A reminder to not believe everything you hear about on the internet, even if you feel smart and scientific about an article having a link to some paper or something. Didn’t read tfa back then.
Edit: now I read this thread, ugh.
The authors are from a Seattle non-profit called Toxic Free Future (https://toxicfreefuture.org/mission/https://toxicfreefuture....)
Had the mistake been made in the other direction, making the significance of their finding very small, would they have double checked their math? You bet they would have.
So an order-of-magnitude difference has no impacts on the result? How can that be?
Previous numbers, incorrectly stated at 10x true values: "of high concern because they are 80% of daily value"
New numbers: "still of high concern even though they are only 8% of daily value"
“As Schwarcz points out, it appears the study’s hypothesis is correct, that black plastic recycled out of electronic devices, mostly in Asia, is getting back into the American supply chain for household kitchen items, including spatulas.”
I think of this as "too technical to be correct." It's a really good example of how when writing for HN as an audience, it's best to use as few concrete details as possible. They will be scrutinized endlessly, and any flaw or inconsistency in them no matter how trivial or spurious will be taken as refutation of the entire statement.
Basically, all plastic has chemicals that, given enough time, will leech into your food and cause contamination. The question is; how much do we tolerate as a society while still enjoying the cost and convenience of plastic?
For me, I try to minimize plastic contact as much as possible. I only use metal utensils. I also use cast iron or stainless steel cookware with no coatings (other than seasoning the cast iron).
1) https://www.google.com/search?client=firefox-b-1-d&q=does+pl...
2) https://www.fda.gov/food/food-ingredients-packaging/packagin...
Silverware Bin; Will contaminate each utensil a predictable amount per unit of time, consistently, up until a saturation point where the utensile cannot contain any more contamination. So the max amount of contaminant is 1x[surface area of utensil].
Meat and veggies; Will be contaminated based on the amount of surface area in contact with plastic, and the amount of time time they spend in contact with plastic. So the max amount of contaminant is [surface area of food touching plastic]x[duration of exposure]. An important note, the food is usually refrigerated. Heat is what releases many of the chemicals from the plastic.
A cooking utensile will contaminate food a highly variable amount based on; The amount of surface area that touches the food, how long the utensile touches the food, the temperature of the food, the fat content of the food, the temperature of the cookware/utensile, the age and quality of the utensile, and a slew of other factors.
Additionally, we both have to deal with the three things you brought up. We all have dishwashers, and plastic bins, and plastic packaging. But you are ALSO using plastic utensils. So you invariably will have more chemicals from plastic than me, despite any other factors.
Are we assuming that children also weigh 60 kilograms, that they don't eat, or that we never liked them anyway?