If TikTok had you rushing to throw away your black plastic kitchen utensils, rest assured that those tools weren’t as bad as they seemed.
A study went viral in November — as much as any study can go viral — that suggested black plastic kitchen utensils were shedding lots of poison into our food thanks to a flame retardant carried over from recycled electronics that helped make the plastic tools. However, there was a big problem in the study that came down to simple math, as Canada’s National Post reported.
In short, the study looked to measure the median amount a flame retardant toxin might get out of black plastic spatulas during cooking. The study found that figure was 34,700 nanograms per day, which, the study noted, was close to the EPA limit of 42,000. That, in part, sparked lots of panic all over TikTok and in major publications about how black plastic cooking utensils were slowly poisoning everyone. I cannot tell you how many posts I saw online of folks throwing away their utensils or telling others to do so.
However, the study made a really simple math error, one that may have made its findings sound more severe than they should. The National Post reported that the study calculated that EPA limit by multiplying 7,000 — the amount of nanograms of the toxin per kilogram of bodyweight — by 60, to get the limit for a 60-kilogram (132 pound) person per day. That’s how they got 42,000. But 60 multiplied by 7,000 is, in fact, 420,000 — meaning the exposure is actually less than one-tenth the limit.
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Now that’s not to say folks want any of that toxin leeching into their food. Zero would be a great figure. But as YouTube’s favorite science nerd, Hank Green, pointed out on Bluesky “that paper on black plastic was a bit blown out of proportion by a simple math error.”
Toxic-Free Future, an advocacy group that carried out the study, has said that while there was a mistake it does not affect the overall findings.
“As noted in the published correction, this comparison was not a major point of the study and the findings, conclusions, and recommendations are unaffected by this correction,” the group wrote on Bluesky.
So you might want to still be wary of black plastic — but all those headlines and TikToks might’ve been a bit misleading.
