The Great Black Plastic Spatula Panic

Photo-Illustration: The Strategist; Photos: Getty

Zoë Schlanger, a science writer atTheAtlantic, was looking for a story last October when she got an email about a new study warning how the chemicals in black-plastic cookware could be leaching into our food. “I’d done a lot of plastic stories; I thought this was old news,” she says. But when she took it to her co-workers, no one else knew about it. Although microplastic panic had been around fordecades, there was less awareness of how flame-retardant chemicals could be transferred through the plastic going in our ripping hot pans and into our mouths.

The study, by a nonprofit called Toxic Free Future, outlined how potentially cancer-causing, hormone-disrupting chemicals were found in far more food-grade plastics than previously known. If you were using a contaminated spatula, the study said, you could be exposing yourself to 80 percent of the daily EPA limit for a chemical called BDE-209 — a flame retardant found in the plastic in TVs, computer casings, and other things that should not be lit on fire or eaten.

There was a wave of general-interest reports on the peer-reviewed study, but Schlanger’s story, “Throw Out Your Black Plastic Spatula,” hit a nerve. Maybe it was the headline, a one-trick fix for the overwhelming anxiety of our daily plastic exposure. (It was certainly an easier sell than “Stop Ordering Takeout Sushi.” The new research found some of the highest levels of flame-retardant chemicals in those takeout trays.) Or it was her effective case showing how failures in the recycling process lead to dangerous black plastic in cookware and why plastic + heat + friction is a bad equation. Either way, the story became one ofTheAtlantic’s top posts of the year and led to a trend of TikTok videos using the screengrab as a way into the conversation. Friends texted Schlanger about how her story convinced them or their parents to ditch black plastic in the kitchen. There was even one “funny text from a friend in Vermont saying that the entire city of Burlington was throwing black-plastic spatulas out of their window in unison,” she says. (Whether 100 percent true or not, the vision does capture the hysteria that ripped through the internet that week.) At a party that fall in Soho, she was introduced as the black-plastic-spatula girl.

In a nonrepresentative survey of the staff atNew YorkMagazine, some of my colleagues reported that the article prompted them to throw away not only their black spatulas but their coffee-makers, leftover containers, and ladles, while others were plunged into deep paranoid spirals, seeing suspicious little pieces of black plastic on everything in their kitchen, including beloved tea kettles they couldn’t bear to part with. “There is something so ominous about black plastic specifically. It evokes burbling toxic sludge,” quipped one person, who switched to stainless steel after theAtlanticpiece.

The study even had its own sales boost. Three companies selling silicone or nonplastic cookware (Our Place, the Silicone Kitchen, and GIR) say they noticed revenue increase as the black-plastic panic spread. Even OXO, the name brand for black plastic in the kitchen, noted that stainless-steel and silicone tools were“outpacing”plastic sales. “Customers weren’t browsing; they were actively replacing,” wrote Suze Dowling, the founder of GIR’s parent company. “The urgency was clear,” she said, claiming that its Amazon sales from that October doubled over the prior year.

But how clear was the science? That December, in his office on the McGill University campus in Montreal, chemistry professor Dr. Joseph Schwarcz took a look. “I don’t know why; I just checked the calculation,” he says. Schwarcz didn’t even need a calculator. It turns out the Toxic Free Future team overestimated the level of potential BDE-209 by a factor of ten. (It was a simple math error that caused all that panic: The researchers based their study on the result that 7,000 x 60 is 42,000. The correct answer is 420,000. That means the potential exposure from a black-plastic spatula is not 80 percent of the EPA limit; it is 8 percent.)

So did all those spatulas and reused takeout containers end up in the landfill for nothing?

Schwarcz, for one, does not fear this polymer. After revealing the multiplication error, he says he would not throw out a black-plastic spatula if he had one. At 77, he is a wooden-utensil man, though he also says he uses nonstick cookware, a no-no for many plastic-anxious people worried about forever chemicals leaching into their food. He may have a point about the relative toxicity of the plastic spatula. Just a few weeks ago, on July 3, Toxic Free Futureannouncedaseconderror — their formula estimating BDE-209 exposure to hot oil found that the potential exposure was even less, at around 1.8 percent of the daily EPA limit.

After both errors, Toxic Free Future announced it was standing by the paper’s “overall conclusion” — that a deeply flawed recycling systemresultsin “unexpected exposure to toxic flame retardants in household items.” None of the three scientists in the study responded to requests for comment, but a press representative for Toxic Free Future did note that no one from big plastic ever filed a lawsuit against them over the mistakes.

While the paper was fixed to reflect the bad math,The Atlanticdid not issue a correction because Schlanger never cited the errors in her survey; her story mostly relied on research from 2018 showing the links to hormonal disruption and cancer caused by flame retardants in black plastic that have stood the test of time. “I was surprised by the blog posts that were like, ‘No, you don’t have to worry about the black-plastic spatula because they made a math error,’” she says. “It doesn’t change the point. You should not be ingesting flame retardants.”

Some researchers agree. Dr. Tracey Woodruff, who studies the impacts of chemical pollutants on health at the University of California, San Francisco, says it is “unfortunate” that these math errors made it through the peer-review process. But she adds that there is “no safe level” of exposure for ingesting flame retardants. Plus, the levels of measuring by regulatory agencies “don’t account for the fact that people are already exposed to multiple chemicals,” she says. “They don’t really account for the full range of susceptibilities. For example, for children.”

If you’ve held on to your worn black-plastic spatula or takeout containers from hangovers past, take solace in the fact that they may contain less flame retardant than we thought during last fall’s freakout. In that informal office poll, some co-workers said they remained loyal to their favorite black spatulas, though others seemed to have adopted a kind of Zen approach to all the things that may or may not spell our eventual doom. “My philosophy on this is if a spatula kills me I am supposed to die,” said one person.

At least throwing out black-plastic stuff does provide a degree of agency on a planet contaminated, nearly at the atomic level, by micro- and nanoplastics. In your own kitchen, “you have some modicum of control over lowering your dose in some way,” says Woodruff. Action is good, freaking out is bad; both microplastics and stress are causes of inflammation.

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