Black plastic spatulas: What the problem is—and why you don’t have to toss yours.

Nov 05, 2024

People are regularly worried about whether their generic kitchen goods are poisoning them. Whether it’s lead in Lunchables, air pollution from gas stoves, or chemicals leaching from nonstick pans, there are constantly concerns from all corners that we are slowly being killed by our food, one way or another.

The newest example in this genre: Concerning compounds in black plastic spatulas are migrating into our cooking oil, according to an article Atlantic titled in no uncertain terms: “Throw Out Your Black Plastic Spatula.” The idea has found legs on social media, with wellness influencers the world over furiously telling people to get rid of their black plastic goods.

The reality is nuanced: Yes, there is a real problem that’s been identified. But, on the level of the cookware in your kitchen, it’s not that concerning. I’m an epidemiologist, I have looked closely at the research, and I am still using my black plastic spatula. I have no plans to stop any time soon.

If you’ve heard that black plastic might be an issue for your health, it’s almost certainly due to the hard work of Andrew Turner. Turner, a researcher at the University of Plymouth, has been looking into this issue since the 2010s and has published a wide range of research on the problem since then.

The basic issue is fairly simple: Black plastic is often used in electronic products. I’m typing this piece on a black plastic keyboard, looking at a screen with a black plastic border. On my desk, there are black plastic headphones, pens, and cables. These products can have chemicals added to them that you wouldn’t want in your cooking utensils—like flame retardants created from bromine. And yet, it appears that the plastic they are made of is sometimes accidentally recycled into cooking utensils, and even toys.

There’s no question that Turner has demonstrated that a slew of broadly worrisome chemicals can be present in black plastic goods. He’s run a series of studies showing that some portion—often a relatively small fraction—of these goods do have contaminants like bromine, lead, mercury, and antimony in them.

So why am I keeping my black plastic spatula? It’s a simple question of dose. Turner has shown that there is an issue with the plastics supply chain. But the data about the levels of pollutants in these products shows that they are, in fact, quite safe.

For example, take the flame retardants that are discussed in such fearful terms in the Atlantic piece “You simply do not want flame retardants anywhere near your stir-fry,” writes Zoë Schlanger, noting: “The health concerns associated with those chemicals are well established.” But just because a compound can pose health concerns doesn’t mean its mere presence poses health concerns. It’s true that these compounds are being found in some cooking products, and occasionally at high levels. But if you look at the data found by Toxic-Free Future, an advocacy group, most of the products were less than 0.001 percent retardant. Yes, some of the products did have very high levels of brominated chemicals, but that’s not true of the majority of the samples they tested.

Similarly, it’s true that these brominated compounds can get into cooking oils. In one experiment, researchers boiled pieces of black spatula that had been identified to have “elevated” levels of contaminants, in 320 F degree oil for 15 minutes and then looked to see how many of these chemicals were present in the oil. In this very extreme model of “cooking”—most people don’t leave their spatulas in the fryer and walk away for a quarter of an hour—most, though not all, of the samples collected had “negligible” amounts of these chemicals in them.

So, it’s true that there may be issues with these contaminants if you use your spatulas in a very unusual way and literally cook them into your food, but it’s not clear that this is a real risk that’s actually happening to people in real life. Let’s put it this way: Even if you do boil your spatula and consume the oil, chances are that spatula does not contain brominated compounds. If it does, you will probably have mere nanograms (billionths of a gram) of the stuff in your food even after very lengthy exposures.

The fact that there is currently little regulatory oversight over how these plastics are recycled is an issue that we obviously need to fix. Plastic is used in all kinds of things, and it is not controversial at all to say that the amount of mercury in, say, pacifiers for babies should be none. There’s no good reason for black plastic spatulas to have this stuff in them.

But even according to Turner’s scientific articles, it’s clear that the problem is not quite as scary as the headlines have been suggesting. Even in the more severe cases, many of these products fall under existing thresholds for risk, such as the WHO tolerable daily intake or European Commission limits. In some cases, the experiments show quite clearly that the risk of serious contamination from many of these plastics is extremely low.

So, we should almost certainly be regulating these products better, and Turner has proven that this area has underacknowledged risks, and we need to act on that to make sure that black plastics are, broadly speaking, safe. But personally, I’m still going to use my black plastic spatula. This is a problem that requires regulation—it’s not something that I’m personally concerned about in my own life.