Even if the factor is off by 10, it's already too much chemical exposure. Also EPA limits can often, due to industry pressure, be set way too high. So better be save and throw away that spatula, which actually this article also reiterates.
==== 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.
>Even if the factor is off by 10, it's already too much chemical exposure.
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.
That’s if you limit the comparison to just Bromine. You are ingesting recycled plastic from TVs and Tires, which also contains; Phthalates, Bisphenols, Polyvinyl Chloride, Styrene, PFAS, and several other chemicals shown to cause cancer or have an unlinked but possible cause of cancer (we don’t know yet but there are alternative utensils not made of black plastic that we do know that don’t have the big ?)
>which also contains; Phthalates, Bisphenols, Polyvinyl Chloride, Styrene, PFAS, and several other chemicals shown to cause cancer or have an unlinked but possible cause of cancer (we don’t know yet but there are alternative utensils not made of black plastic that we do know that don’t have the big ?)
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?
You’re right that many of these chemicals are already present in our daily environment. But that doesn’t mean every source of exposure is equivalent or that we should stop caring about reducing it where we can. Think of it this way: if you know you’re going to be exposed to some harmful substances, it still makes sense to lower your overall intake whenever possible. It’s not about achieving total elimination, which might be impossible, but about minimizing unnecessary risks.
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?
That makes complete sense. For me, the time investment is totally neutral. I would buy a water filter anyway to mitigate other harms. Using stainless steel utensils vs plastic ones doesn't cost me any time at all. So I have risk reduced with 0 time investment.
Thank you for sharing that information about aluminum and brass cookware; I wasn’t aware of those details before.
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.
In terms of cooking utensils silicone or bamboo might be a better choice than stainless steel. I don't think I've ever seen brass cooking stuff. I've often seen brass bowls with stickers warning that they aren't food safe.
> I've often seen brass bowls with stickers warning that they aren't food safe.
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).
My spouse had already mostly eliminated black plasticware from our kitchen long before this article came out anyway.
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.
> Even if the factor is off by 10, it's already too much chemical exposure.
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.
The thing off by a factor of 10 here was not the level of the chemical, it was the calculation of the recommended safety level.
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.
> The thing off by a factor of 10 here was not the level of the chemical, it was the calculation of the recommended safety level.
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.
I’m pretty sure take one lead molecule per day would not cause any detectable harm, even 1 additional nanogram likely too. So there a safe dosage of lead it is just hard to determine where the line between safe and unsafe is.
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.
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.
> > I’m pretty sure take one lead molecule per day would not cause any detectable harm [..] even 1 additional nanogram likely too
> "You're pretty sure" isn't unfortunately scientifically admissible evidence
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...
Yes, I'm familiar with exactly how small an atom is.
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.
My point was that ‘no known safe level’ is not the same as ‘no safe level’. And it is not known because it is both hard to detect negative impact of small doses and because no one would spend money on such work when there are many more important problems.
It doesn't, obviously, since it's not possible to prove a negative. Much like there's nothing that proves that you won't begin to be able to fly if you stand on one leg long enough.
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.
How do you know that exposure to comments by people named “cwillu” does not lead to cancer by some delayed chain reaction that takes decades to become visible?
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!
My spouse worked as a server in a restaurant, was told not to do this and learned the hard way and it's common sense: someone has to empty the machine, clean it completely out, and wait for it to fill back up again which takes hours.
Do people still use ice drawers anymore? I only see dispensers everywhere.
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.
I poured soup into a glass bowl that contained many shards from a chipped rim that I failed to notice. I had consumed nearly the entire bowl when I bit into the largest shard.
I strained the remaining soup for glass, found more shards, but many were unaccounted for. Only possibility left was that I had slurped them down
Big difference between glass and plastics. Glass is chemical inert while plastics degrades and leaks into everything. See the flavor of a plastic bottle that has been in your car for a while. Some plastics may even resemble stuff that is in your body. It's all processed dinosaur juice after all (actually trees, but whatever).
"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."
Glass is not so harmless when you consume shards of it. Chemically inert things can damage the body by mechanical means (I’m a little surprised that this has to be said!)
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.
Wood is safe, but since it's organic has the potential to fuel the growth of molds, bacteria, and other microorganisms. I'm not sure the best way to sanitize wood from these elements? You could light the wood on fire, but then you wouldn't have any wood leftover.
I've heard the opposite, that wood has anti-microbial properties that results in less cross contamination than plastic, even though it is harder to sterilize. For example, here is one study on cutting boards[1].
You can seal woods (polyurethane, linseed oil, etc) and they take well to disinfectants (UV, povidone iodine, etc) and can be submerged in common commercial disinfectant washes.
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.
Wooden spoons go in the dishwasher and then they're perfectly safe. Wooden chopping boards have been shown to be safer than plastuc, because they don't get the cuts that plastic boards do, which harbour microorganisms. Cuts in wooden boards close themselves up.
I don't know where this "unless the surface is sterile it is significantly dangerous" thing comes from. How many people have died from bacteria that grew on wooden utensils that were regularly washed? Is it anything other than zero?
> The study, by researchers at the advocacy group Toxic-Free Future...
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.
Very often these are actually astroturfing competitors. There's certainly no shortage of plastic free "eco," "organic" or "green" kitchen utensil manufacturers.
The only real approach here is to scrutinize everything and always be especially critical when someone comes up with something that sounds drastic.
It is a nice theory when you look at it like that but it doesn't have to be so nefarious. First, we have a history of letting that through, leaded gas, insecticide etc but we learnt. Any research is going to suffer from the effect of wanting to confirm and publish, but I'm glad people looking at this stuff. I'd be so much more skeptical of anyone saying X is not toxic so some corporation can keep doing whatever.
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
>wouldn't anyone be glad to know that black plastics have more of a toxic chemical than white ones?
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.
Seeing the authors double down on their paper (characterizating it as a mere typo, saying it doesn't affect their conclusions) does not inspire confidence.
I imagine it’s difficult emotionally to let go of the prestige conferred by a paper that got such wide recognition in the media for the mere fact that its conclusions are wrong.
Use carbon steel pans and stainless steel utensils anyway. Better for everyone, extremely durable and, shockingly, they don't stick. Bonus point your fried eggs get a delicious wok hei.
Somehow we all got convinced that teflon and complex polymers were solving a problem... It's simply not true.
While I agree with the advice, and all I use are steel and cast iron, I think you need a big disclaimer on "they don't stick." To a new user coming from Teflon, they absolutely stick.
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.
I have found seasoning doesn't affect the stickiness of the pan. My MIL left my carbon steel pan sitting in water, so I had to grind it to the bone to remove the rust. But even with no seasoning, I was able to cook eggs no problem. The key is temperature control. However, the pan started getting rusty from just sitting out, so I ended up re-seasoning it anyway.
> To a new user coming from Teflon, they absolutely stick.
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...
Unless you're using a very small pan, there's no way 5ml of oil is going to provide enough coating for "eggs" (plural) "that flip perfectly". Also, the "taste 100x better" claim is so hyperbolic that I have to internally downgrade it to "I like it more".
I maintain that "100x better" is an understatement for teflon eggs vs eggs fried in butter.
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 maintain that "100x better" is an understatement for teflon eggs vs eggs fried in butter.
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.
You’re missing a rather fundamental way that nonstick pans (teflon or “ceramic”) differ from metal or seasoned metal: nonstick coated pans are usually oleophobic, and oils do not wet or otherwise coat them well. So you can’t cook your eggs on a very thin layer of butter or oil. But steel and seasoned steel will be wetted by hot oil or butter, and you can properly fry your eggs.
> Also there’s never a good reason to be extremely strict about fat consumption that 5 or 10 or 15ml is a problem
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).
The whole point of non-stick pans is not to need any fat/oil, not even a little bit, though. No matter how often people tell me, stainless steel, carbon steel or cast iron, none are as good and low effort as a simple non-stick pan.
I don't think it's really lower effort if you account for the care with which you need to cook with teflon (no metal utensil), wash it (no dishwasher) and store it (no stacking). Unless you replace it every ~year I suppose.
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
I mostly use wooden cookware, and I throw that and non-stick pans in the dishwasher, teflon is so chemically stable that it shouldn't matter. But yes, I just buy a new pan every ~2 years, sometimes 3.
Teflon is known to not interact when it is in its stable long polymer state. But if we accept that it is breaking away from that state, we know it is not stable, and is potentially reactive.
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.
Carbon steel pans are seasoned and generally will be stored with a light coat of oil. You'll add oil while cooking, as well. My carbon steel pans don't stick – an egg will happily glide on the surface.
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
There is no oil used in the video that I linked. Did you watch another video?
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:
Ah, forgive me. I was going off memory and thought you meant during the heat testing portion which only used water for the test.
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.
This reminded me of this funny skit video I saw recently about cast iron seasoning [0].
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.
Seasoning doesnt matter. In all 3 cases, the key factor is temperature control. I can make eggs in all three types of pans with no sticking and no seasoning. Seasoning is only to protect the metal from rust.
You can turn any stainless steel pot/pan into a nonstick via the Leidenfrost effect[1]. Only takes a 1-2m extra, and is quite satisfying to watch as well. We have a few carbon steel dishes for intense nonstick cooking but the kids love to see the water balls dance around when they cook.
I’ve never found this compelling. Sure, if you cook at silly hot temperatures, then certain things won’t stick. What if you don’t want to cook at silly temperatures, though?
As a proud user of an actually temperature controlled pan, I can do the experiment easily: I cook most meats at a temperature decently below the Leidenfrost temperature, with excellent results. Most veggies, too, but not pancakes. I also find rather hard to imagine that a hamburger or a carrot an egg is actually floating over a cushion of steam while cooking instead of contacting the pan or the oil on the pan. (Even ignoring the implausibility of the Leidenfrost effect supporting a piece of squishy, irregular food and the implausibility of the idea that the pan remains above the Leidenfrost temperature for very long while cooking most foods, much of what’s noteworthy about the Leidenfrost effect is that it limits heat transfer from the pan to the suspended liquid. You are not caramelizing or getting much of any Maillard reaction on a surface that is only in contact with steam at slightly above ambient pressure — it’s too cold!)
"wok hei" is the charred, smoky taste from Chinese stir-fry dishes, which you can only get at very high temperatures, usually with an open flame.
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.
It's just a somewhat poetic way to describe the flavors you get when cooking with really high heat really fast. You can't get it on teflon because you're using temps 100+ degrees above what teflon can handle without decomposing.
To clarify, you can't use any teflon or ceramic nonstick coating at the temps required, regardless of heating method. The coatings will degrade, and possibly poison you.
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.
Toxic chemicals aside, does anyone else have trouble accepting how little effort entities whose job is to recycle put into recycling? The article explains that recycling facilities throw out black plastic utensils just because the infrared light in sorting machines can't sort it. I've also heard that unscrewed bottle-caps, or other small plastics also fall in the common waste dump at the facility.
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 recycling facilities throw out black plastic utensils just because the infrared light in sorting machines can't sort it
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.
What are the alternative solutions for dark packaging?
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.
> I've also heard that unscrewed bottle-caps, or other small plastics also fall in the common waste dump at the facility.
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.
> 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.
"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%."
The problem is that plastic recycling in general just doesn't work that well. If you want to make any sort of difference then reducing the amount of plastic you use & throw away is essential.
It's not 8% of some hypothetical dose dose that would be known to be harmless to humans. It's 8% of a dose that seemed harmless to mice, when administered for no longer than a mouse's lifespan, as far as the EPA looked.
While true, I believe the point is that mice don't live very long, so long term effects may not be visible.
(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).
While I agree that logarithms are better for expressing most physical quantities, when those values are used by humans, the "common logarithms" a.k.a. base-10 logarithms, which are used at your link, are completely obsolete.
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.
Cute idea! But I hardly think base-10 logarithms are "completely" obsolete. We write numbers in base-10 and so the length of the number is its magnitude. Your statement is like saying that strlen() is obsolete and we should be using strlen2() which reports the number of bits in the string instead.
Why not just type 3.1E7 instead of the weird up arrow?
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.
Because that's still 2 numbers, complicating comparisons and arithmetic, and the more important number is at the end. If you could use e7.5 then that would alleviate the problems, but no software/language/calculator accepts this notation, and using a caret like ^7.5 is more evocative than the already very-overloaded "e".
This scale goes to 11. The age of the universe is ^17 and the size of the Universe is ^27. IMO this is still on the -10 to +10 scale, considering the sizes of the quantities involved.
Thanks for the comment, I appreciate your willingness to share your disdain!
So glad I didn’t throw out my utensils after the last thread here on HN. Saved nature a little and confronted fears induced by media. Although I must admit that I was scraping the pan with the constant realization that I might die, for more than a month.
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.
We did throw our black plastic utensils out, but I have no regrets; even if the risk was not as bad as we believed at the time, the scare gave us a great excuse to replace old cheap stuff with nicer wood & silicone implements.
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.
Even so, I think there should be a broad push against plastic involvement in most aspects of the food supply. From microplastic pollution to endocrine-disruptive leeches, too much is too much.
Scientific results, when presented to the general public, often lose their nuance and context, even when news organizations strive for accuracy. Translating complex data into digestible news sacrifices precision, leading to widespread misunderstandings about science and the value of correction within the scientific community.And when there’s a genuine mistake in a study, like this one, the entire study is unfortunately dismissed.
Glad I held on to my kitchen utensils. Given how broad the hype cycle was and how I was getting push notifications on my phone about it from multiple "news" sources it felt like hysteria. Likely helped black friday sales at Sur la Table though.
And the person who found the error nevertheless agrees with the original conclusion, FTA:
“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.”
This is the perfect article for HN because the problem is still real and the recommendation to avoid black plastic around food is still good. But because there was an error that affects but does not undermine the conclusion, the entire premise is rejected.
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.
It's not hype. The FDA regularly issues guidance on "how much plastic" they allow in our food. I know someone who works in a lab that measures the chemicals transferred in such conditions. The results from his lab are used to certify food processing equipment.
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).
I wonder how big is the risk of having a dishwasher with plastic components? Or a silverware drawer with plastic bins? Or meat and vegetables that come in plastic bags?
Dishwasher; Will contaminate each dish a predictable amount, consistently. A tiny amount on each dish that correlates to about 3% of the surface area of each dish sitting in the rack for a couple of hours. So the max contaminant is n% of [surface area of each dish] per wash cycle.
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.
> “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.”
This could only come from the National Post, cheerleaders of any conservative cause in Canada. They're pretty big boosters of the oil & gas industry, and supportive of every spin-off you can imagine. Their paper straw reportage is second to none.
475 points, 845 comments, 42 days ago https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41996156