from Hacker News

A simple math error sparked a panic about black plastic kitchen utensils

by IndrekR on 12/12/24, 3:34 PM with 176 comments

• by michaelt on 12/12/24, 5:03 PM

  Previously on HN: "Cooking with black plastic is particularly crucial to avoid"

  475 points, 845 comments, 42 days ago https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41996156

• by mentalgear on 12/12/24, 4:23 PM

  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.

• by FredPret on 12/12/24, 5:03 PM

  I read an article about "crunchy moms" https://www.wsj.com/style/rfk-jr-health-initiatives-crunchy-...

  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.

• by sholladay on 12/12/24, 5:18 PM

  Credit where it is due, if Joe Schwarcz discovered the error “a few days ago” or even within the last week, then he wasn’t the first.

  The earliest I know of is Adam Ragusea.

  https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=58HUM40gDPU

• by tqi on 12/12/24, 4:43 PM

  > 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.

• by simgt on 12/12/24, 4:58 PM

  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.

• by arboles on 12/12/24, 8:59 PM

  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.

• by croes on 12/12/24, 4:23 PM

  Ok it’s not 80% of EPA limit but only 8%

  But I don’t want 8% exposure either if it’s avoidable

• by saulpw on 12/12/24, 4:47 PM

  This error would have been much easier to catch if they had used mag notation[0].

  [0] https://saul.pw/mag

• by wruza on 12/12/24, 9:19 PM

  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.

  Edit: now I read this thread, ugh.

• by andrewmutz on 12/12/24, 4:32 PM

  Unfortunately this story will probably be far less viral than the previous story, so people will never find out that black utensils are fine

• by kcaj on 12/13/24, 3:48 PM

  Bad incentives lead to bad science.

  The authors are from a Seattle non-profit called Toxic Free Future (https://toxicfreefuture.org/mission/https://toxicfreefuture....)

  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.

• by SubiculumCode on 12/12/24, 4:22 PM

  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.

• by mhardcastle on 12/12/24, 7:28 PM

  “However, it is important to note that this does not impact our results,” [lead study author] Liu told National Post."

  So an order-of-magnitude difference has no impacts on the result? How can that be?

• by oidar on 12/12/24, 4:56 PM

  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.

• by stevenhubertron on 12/12/24, 4:15 PM

  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.

• by sinuhe69 on 12/12/24, 4:42 PM

  Damn, even my kid learned from the danger of black plastic kitchenware from school and advised me to drop all of them!

• by warkdarrior on 12/12/24, 4:35 PM

  This research was probably sponsored by the kitchen utensil-manufacturing industry.

• by chias on 12/12/24, 6:26 PM

  > [...] calculates this into a limit for a 60-kilogram adult [...]

  Are we assuming that children also weigh 60 kilograms, that they don't eat, or that we never liked them anyway?