Cooking with black plastic might not be good for you

If you're worried about microplastics, you should certainly not be scraping your hot cooking surfaces or slapping your food around with soft black plastic. Worse, some is recycled from electronics waste and may contain things even less appetizing than polyethylene.

For the past several years, I've been telling my friends what I'm going to tell you: Throw out your black plastic spatula. In a world of plastic consumer goods, avoiding the material entirely requires the fervor of a religious conversion. But getting rid of black plastic kitchen utensils is a low-stakes move, and worth it. Cooking with any plastic is a dubious enterprise, because heat encourages potentially harmful plastic compounds to migrate out of the polymers and potentially into the food. But, as Andrew Turner, a biochemist at the University of Plymouth recently told me, black plastic is particularly crucial to avoid.

Here's the original paper, at Environment International: Black plastics: Linear and circular economies, hazardous additives and marine pollution.

there is mounting evidence that the demand for black plastics in consumer products is partly met by sourcing material from the plastic housings of end-of-life waste electronic and electrical equipment (WEEE). Inefficiently sorted WEEE plastic has the potential to introduce restricted and hazardous substances into the recyclate

Whatever the truth is about such things, few are going to be on their deathbeds at 110 saying "You know, I wish I'd eaten more brominated flame retardants."

Previously:
Microplastics have been found in human blood for the first time ever
Microplastics found in human poop
Microplastics found in every semen test sample in study
Microplastics in drinking water is likely not harmful to people, World Health Organization says