That black plastic spatula in your kitchen drawer might be harboring toxic flame retardants from recycled electronics that could leach into your family’s food.
A study of commonly used black plastic household products has raised red flags about safety, revealing that many items, including kitchen utensils, toys, and food containers, are laced with flame retardants that have been linked to cancer and developmental problems in children.
The study examined 203 black plastic products purchased from local Seattle retailers and online platforms between 2020 and 2022. They included 109 kitchen utensils, 36 toys, 30 hair accessories, and 28 food containers, including takeout trays.
“Out of the products we tested, the product categories with the most concerning and high-risk sources of exposure to flame retardants are food-contact material, kitchen utensils and food service-ware items, and toys,” Megan Liu, study co-author, told The Epoch Times.
“These categories are particularly concerning because flame retardants have been found to leach out of kitchen utensils and into food, as well as out of toys into children through saliva by mouthing of toys,” she said.
The authors believe the toxins are likely introduced through recycling of electronic components that contain flame retardants.
“Plastics from electronics are often recycled and can be incorporated in household items that do not require flame retardancy, resulting in potentially high and unnecessary exposure,” the authors wrote.
“These cancer-causing chemicals shouldn’t be used to begin with, but with recycling, they are entering our environment and our homes in more ways than one,” said Liu, who is the science and policy manager at Toxic-Free Future, a research and advocacy nonprofit.
Flame retardants have been found in indoor dust at e-waste recycling facilities in Canada, China, Spain, and the United States, according to the study. Soil samples collected near e-waste recycling locations in China and Vietnam were also found to contain the harmful substances.
These findings “provide further evidence” that the recycling of electronics containing flame retardants leads to exposure for both humans and the environment, the researchers wrote.
Of the items investigated, beaded necklaces made for children registered the highest level of flame retardants at 22,800 milligrams per kilogram.
“Children are a vulnerable population, and it is really concerning to think that they could be exposed to these flame retardants that are associated with carcinogenicity, endocrine disruption, neurotoxicity, and reproductive and developmental toxicity at early ages,” Liu said.
A study published in the journal Scientific Reports found elevated blood levels of flame retardants in American adults were associated with lung dysfunction.
Studies conducted in Europe, Asia, and Africa also found evidence of flame retardants in other products, such as hair accessories and office supplies. As in the United States, flame retardants were not intended to be added to these products in the manufacturing process.
Flame Retardants Found in Breast Milk
A 2023 study found flame retardants in breast milk, which means they were being passed on to breastfeeding infants. Liu said this was what propelled her to do the research.
After reading studies on flame retardant contamination from other countries, the researchers decided to investigate whether the same kind of contamination was occurring in the United States.
The study’s authors say their findings highlight the need for stricter regulations on harmful chemicals.
“The detection of FRs [flame retardants] in collected household products indicates that recycling, without the necessary transparency and restrictions to ensure safety, is resulting in unexpected exposure to toxic flame retardants in [U.S.] household items,” the study concludes.
Study Detects Banned Flame Retardants
Electronic products that are manufactured with flame retardants, such as DecaBDE, have been shown to cause severe adverse health effects, including neurotoxicity, endocrine disruption, and cancer.
The Stockholm Convention on Persistent Organic Pollutants lists DecaBDE as one of the substances banned under its convention, with limited exemptions in certain countries for specific uses. While the US signed onto the convention in 2021, it never ratified it and thus is not a member. However, the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) says it is banned in most industries, and the exempted industries have deadlines to phase it out completely. Nevertheless, DecaBDE was still detected in some of the plastics the researchers tested.
That could be because the ban includes an exception for recycled plastics.
The EPA cites an“Exclusion for distribution and recycling of plastic that contained decaBDE before the plastic was recycled (i.e., the plastic to be recycled is from articles and products that were originally made with decaBDE), and the articles and products made from such recycled plastic so long as no new decaBDE is added during the recycling or production process”.
The study authors say there are three main issues—the continuous use of hazardous flame retardants in widely produced consumer products, lack of restriction on their use, and poorly controlled recycling practices—as the root cause of the contamination of the items in contact with food and children.
“We can’t shop our way out of the problem, and what we really need are restrictions on the most harmful chemicals and materials, such as toxic flame retardants and hazardous plastics, at both the corporate and government level,” Liu said.
According to Liu, safer alternatives exist. “Having restrictions in place will help move the market toward safer solutions,” she said. “We need restrictions to turn off the tap on harmful chemicals and plastics, which will help protect the health of everyone, especially vulnerable populations such as women and children.”
Note: The study’s authors posted two corrections after publication. One stated they had incorrectly calculated the BDE-209 reference dose for a 60 kg adult. The other said that “the formula used to estimate BDE-209 exposure from contaminated kitchen utensils to hot cooking oil, based on the simulated cooking experiments of Kuang et al. (2018) and the median levels found in the contaminated cooking utensils, was misinterpreted.” However, the authors defended their results, saying they didn’t set out to assess whether the amount of the flame retardants fell below a particular threshold, but whether they were present in recycled plastics at all.
