Black plastic utensils and flame retardants: what the corrected study really says

For a few weeks in late 2024, the black plastic spatula was public enemy number one. A study found flame retardants from recycled electronics in black kitchen utensils, and headlines told everyone to bin theirs. Then the maths turned out to be wrong, and the authors had to correct the paper twice.

So which is it: toxic e-waste in your frying pan, or another overhyped scare? Annoyingly, a bit of both. The exposure estimate shrank dramatically. The contamination it was estimating did not go away. And the reason it happens is a recycling loophole that regulators have written down in black and white.

Why your spatula might be made of old TVs

Start with the colour. Recycling plants sort plastic using near-infrared light, and the carbon black pigment that makes plastic black absorbs that light. As a result, black plastic is hard for sorting machines to identify. A 2018 review by the environmental chemist Andrew Turner estimated that black products make up about 15% of household plastic waste, mostly single-use food packaging and trays, and that much of it is not readily recycled because sorters can’t see it.

But manufacturers still want black plastic. Turner described “mounting evidence” that some of that demand is met by grinding up the black housings of old electronics: TVs, printers, laptops. Those casings were often made with brominated flame retardants, because electronics have to meet fire-safety rules. Kitchen spoons don’t. When the casings get shredded and remoulded into a spatula, the flame retardant comes along, at concentrations too low to make the spatula fire-resistant but high enough to measure.

The fingerprints are distinctive. In a 2017 survey of more than 1,000 analyses of consumer products, bromine turned up in about 18% of non-electronic items, including a coffee stirrer and thermos cup lids, and most of the contaminated items were black. European researchers testing black food-contact items found bromine in 7 of 10, along with antimony (a flame-retardant booster) and rare earth elements typical of electronics. That’s the chemical equivalent of finding a circuit board inside your soup ladle.

Who found what, before 2024

The black plastic story did not start with the viral paper. Labs in Europe and the US have been documenting it for more than a decade:

• Europe, 2013. In black thermos cups and kitchen utensils on the European market, bromine-positive samples contained mainly technical decaBDE, an electronics flame retardant, plus newer replacements. Styrene-based plastics such as ABS were the highest-risk materials.
• Europe, 2017. A study of 26 samples of toys, food-contact articles and electronic waste found that 61% contained bromine, and 45% of those had decaBDE above the legal limits for this family of chemicals. The authors titled their paper “Evidence of bad recycling practices.”
• UK, 2018. Researchers at the University of Birmingham screened 96 black kitchen utensils. Bromine showed up in 31 of 69 bought before 2011, but only 3 of 27 bought after. In simulated cooking, an average of about 20% of the flame retardants moved from the utensil into hot oil. Their estimate of typical exposure from cooking with a contaminated utensil was a median of 60 nanograms a day.
• United States, 2021. Scientists at the US Food and Drug Administration found brominated flame retardants in 4 of 49 reusable food-contact items bought at retail. In follow-up tests, two of the chemicals migrated into milk, coffee and soup at 1 to 23 micrograms per kilogram.

So by 2024 the core finding had been replicated across countries and labs: some black plastic food-contact items contain recycled electronics plastic, and some of the chemicals can move into food. What nobody had pinned down was how much that matters for health.

The 2024 study, and the two corrections

In September 2024, the journal Chemosphere published a study by Megan Liu and Erika Schreder of Toxic-Free Future, a Seattle advocacy group, and Sicco Brandsma of Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam. They screened 203 black plastic household products sold in the US for bromine, then sent those with more than 50 ppm for full chemical analysis. Flame retardants turned up in 85% of the analysed items, at total concentrations up to 22,800 mg/kg. Plastics typically used in electronics, such as ABS and high-impact polystyrene, carried significantly more than polypropylene or nylon.

According to a Food Packaging Forum summary, the products included 109 kitchen items. Twenty products went to full analysis, including nine kitchen utensils and two food-service items. Among the food-service items, a sushi tray had the most bromine. We couldn’t open the full paper to confirm those breakdowns.

The measurements are not what got corrected. The trouble was one paragraph estimating what cooking with these utensils might mean for your body.

Correction one: the missing zero

The paper estimated that someone cooking with a contaminated utensil would take in a median of 34,700 nanograms a day of BDE-209, the main component of decaBDE. It then compared that with the US Environmental Protection Agency’s reference dose: the daily amount EPA considers likely to be without appreciable risk over a lifetime. For BDE-209 that’s 7 micrograms per kilogram of body weight per day.

For a 60 kg adult, that is 420,000 nanograms a day. The authors had written 42,000. So the paper said intake “would approach” the safety threshold, when it was actually about a tenth of it. In December 2024 they published a correction changing the wording to say intake “remains an order of magnitude lower than” the reference dose, and stated that the error didn’t affect the paper’s overall conclusion.

By the time the fix appeared, the “approaching the safety limit” version had already gone around the world.

Correction two: the exposure estimate itself

In July 2025 a second correction went further. The authors said they had misinterpreted the exposure formula they borrowed from the 2018 Birmingham study, which overestimated exposure. The corrected worst-case estimate is 7,900 nanograms a day, not 34,700, now based on the few utensil samples that had detectable BDE-209. Again, they said the core conclusions stand.

Not everyone agrees the paper is now fixed. Retraction Watch reported that Mark Jones, an industrial chemist who spent his career at Dow Chemical, considers the second correction still inadequate and argued in a letter to the journal that the errors warranted restating the abstract, parts of the paper and its conclusions, if not a retraction. The authors published a reply disputing his points. Liu told Retraction Watch the correction concerned a single exposure example in the discussion section, not the study’s core research or methods. We haven’t read the letter or reply in full.

The abstract as indexed in Europe PMC (PMID 39271080) still carries the original 34,700 figure. If you’re reading about this study, check whether the writer knows that.

What the corrected numbers actually mean

Here’s the arithmetic the headlines should have done.

	Estimated BDE-209 intake	EPA reference dose (60 kg adult)	Share of reference dose
As published (Sept 2024)	34,700 ng/day	42,000 ng/day (wrong)	about 83%
After correction one	34,700 ng/day	420,000 ng/day	about 8%
After correction two	7,900 ng/day	420,000 ng/day	about 2%

The percentages are our own calculation from the figures in the paper and its corrections. Between the two fixes, the headline risk comparison dropped about forty-fold. A worst-case estimate of about 2% of the reference dose isn’t a reason to panic.

It also isn’t the all-clear some coverage implied, for four reasons:

1. The reference dose is not a safety line. EPA set it in 2008, based on neurobehavioural effects in animal studies, and rates its own confidence in it as low. It’s a planning tool, not a line between safe and harmful.
2. BDE-209 is only one chemical. The study found a cocktail of flame retardants. Many replacement chemicals have no reference dose at all. In 2026, the European Food Safety Authority reviewed 27 newer brominated flame retardants and couldn’t derive health-based guidance values for any of them. For the few it could assess, including the decaBDE replacement DBDPE, it judged dietary exposure not a health concern on limited data.
3. These chemicals add to other exposures. BDE-209 also reaches people through house dust and food. A spatula is one source among several.
4. The models disagree wildly. The corrected worst case for one chemical, 7,900 ng a day, is more than a hundred times the Birmingham team’s median estimate of 60 ng a day for all the flame retardants they measured. They used different assumptions, but the gap tells you how uncertain these estimates are.

We found no study linking cooking with black plastic utensils to any health outcome in people. The evidence is about contamination and transfer, not disease.

Is every black spatula contaminated?

No. Contamination is real but patchy, and probably depends on where and when the item was made.

The Birmingham team found bromine far less often in utensils bought after 2011 than before. In January 2025, after the US study went viral, Germany’s consumer testing organisation Stiftung Warentest screened 26 spatulas sold in the EU, including from Ikea, Temu, Tefal and WMF, and found no bromine in any of them. It said contamination couldn’t be entirely ruled out. That’s 26 spatulas from one market, and it doesn’t tell you about the US shelves Liu’s team bought from.

Colour is a warning sign, not a test. Most contaminated items in these studies were black, but not every black item is contaminated, and a contaminated item doesn’t have to be black.

The bigger problem: recycled plastic you can’t trace

The spatula is a symptom. The disease is a recycling system that can’t tell what’s in its feedstock, under rules that don’t ask.

In the US, EPA banned most manufacture and use of decaBDE under its 2021 rules for persistent toxic chemicals. Then it carved out recycling. Its November 2024 revision keeps the exclusion for recycling decaBDE-containing plastic, and for products made from it, as long as no new decaBDE is added. EPA’s reasoning: finding the chemical would need “prohibitively expensive and complicated testing.” In plain English, a chemical banned for being persistent and toxic is allowed to keep circulating in new consumer goods because checking for it costs too much.

Food-contact plastic is supposed to be held to a higher standard. The FDA says its main worry with recycled plastic is that contaminants from post-consumer material may end up in the final food-contact product. But it reviews recycling processes when manufacturers ask it to, rather than testing what’s on the shelves. Its own scientists found unapproved flame retardants in reusable kitchen items on sale anyway. A cheap spatula from an unknown supplier, with no record of where its resin came from, is the gap this system was always going to leak through.

That’s the uncomfortable point for anyone who cheers “recycled content” on a label. Recycled plastic carries forward whatever was in the plastic before, and mechanical recycling doesn’t remove additives. Recycling that works safely needs clean, traceable inputs, which mostly means food-contact plastic recycled back into food contact. Shredding mixed e-waste into kitchenware is the opposite. For why the recycling numbers are so bad to begin with, see our guide to recycling labels.

What to do, ranked by evidence

1. Replace old, cheap black plastic utensils (good evidence of contamination; health effect unknown). Older and unbranded items have been the most likely to contain recycled electronics plastic in testing. You don’t need lab results to retire a scratched, melted or decade-old spatula. It’s cheap, and it removes a source that multiple labs have found.

2. Choose wood or stainless steel (sensible; little direct research). Solid wood and stainless steel don’t contain flame retardants and aren’t recycled e-waste. Use wood on non-stick pans so you don’t scratch the coating. There’s little published research comparing these materials for this specific problem. We recommend them because they avoid the problem entirely, not because a study ranked them. More options in our plastic-free kitchen swaps guide.

3. Don’t assume “new nylon” solves it (moderate evidence of a different issue). Nylon utensils aren’t usually where e-waste flame retardants turn up, but nylon has its own migration problem. A 2016 study of 23 nylon kitchen utensils found they released small building-block molecules called oligomers, with very high migration in hot, alcohol-containing liquid at 95°C. The health significance of those oligomers is poorly understood.

4. Keep plastic out of hot fat (moderate evidence). Heat and oil drove the roughly 20% average transfer in the Birmingham cooking tests. If you keep a plastic utensil, don’t leave it sitting in a hot pan.

5. Be wary of black takeout trays (weak evidence; low-cost precaution). A sushi tray was the most bromine-heavy food-service item in the 2024 study, according to the Food Packaging Forum summary. But nobody we found measured transfer from those trays into food. Moving food onto a plate before reheating costs nothing.

6. Push for the actual fix (strong evidence the loophole exists). Individual swaps don’t touch the root cause: rules that let unsorted, untested recycled plastic into products that touch food, and an EPA exclusion that waves recycled decaBDE through. Ask retailers where their kitchenware resin comes from, and support rules that require testing or traceability for recycled plastic in food-contact goods.

The honest summary: the scariest number in this story was wrong, and the authors had to fix it twice. The finding underneath it wasn’t wrong. E-waste flame retardants are still turning up in things people cook with, because the system lets them. That’s worth being angry about, without inflating the risk.

For how we judge studies and claims, see our standards. More in our kitchen section.