The Hidden Plastics in Your Kitchen and Food

I pride myself on being something of a walking encyclopedia, especially on the topic of food and cooking. I can bore you to tears prattling on about almost anything: fascinating topics like how avocados evolved as giant sloth food, why most "ricotta" on the market isn't real ricotta, how good sheep are at facial recognition, or why choux pastry is really a variant of ancient hot-water crusts. Don't even get me started on the mind-blowing story of honey. So I was surprised when I recently learned that parchment paper is often coated with silicone, a synthetic polymer. I'd been using parchment paper for years and somehow hadn't realized it was, at least in part, a single-use product with a plastic-like coating. It made me wonder—what other items in my kitchen were hidden sources of plastic and other plastic-like synthetic materials? To find out, I called up Shanika Whitehurst, the associate director of product sustainability, research, and testing at Consumer Reports.

I had a short list of my own, but with her expert input, I was able to add several more items. You may know some of these, but I'd wager most folks won't know all of them.

A Plastics Breakdown

One challenging thing about writing an article like this is that "plastic" is such a broad term. Plus, I'm including some plastic-adjacent products in my list, like rubbery silicone. What are we even talking about here? It helps to review terminology because many of the "hidden plastics" in a kitchen aren't easily identifiable objects—they're coatings, linings, films, and additives designed to make various products behave in specific ways.

According to Whitehurst, most of the time in the kitchen, the plastics in question are food-grade plastics like PET (polyethylene terephthalate) and polypropylene, which are both often used for plastic containers and packaging. In addition to those two, PFAS, while not strictly plastic, are a broad class of fluorinated compounds often dubbed "forever chemicals" that frequently show up in kitchen products. They're often used for nonstick coatings and heat-resistant materials. "Those have gotten a ton of publicity in recent years, as they should, because we still don't know what the overall health effects are going to be," said Whitehurst.

A third category that has previously received a lot of attention is BPA (bisphenol A), a chemical used in plastic and epoxy coatings in some can linings that has raised health concerns. "Now you see them advertise that a product is BPA-free, but BPA's cousins are still out there," she said.

And all of this is before we even talk about microplastics—microscopic bits of broken-down plastic that have become pervasive in our environment and our bodies, with unknown health implications (and one reason hidden plastics are top of mind these days).

Let's Not Panic

I was partly driven to build this list because, like many others, microplastics and the broader environmental impacts of plastics are on my mind. I am concerned about what plastics may be doing to our collective health and the earth. But I want to be clear: I'm not trying to fan the flames of irrational fears. Synthetic materials like plastic are an essential part of our modern world, and at this point, we couldn't easily live without them and probably wouldn't want to.

I was thinking about this recently while loading my dishwasher. My wife and I had agreed a few years ago to try to avoid putting plastic items in the dishwasher, an attempt to minimize the degradation of the plastics we do use from exposure to the dishwasher's high heat and strong detergents. Then, a few months ago, I looked inside, and it clicked: The whole thing was full of plastic. The plastic-coated racks, the entirely plastic silverware tray, the detergent and rinse-aid tray, the spinning sprayer arms, and many components of the pumps and drains. All that time, we'd been thinking we'd banned plastic from our dishwasher, yet every load had involved plastic.

When I relayed this story to Whitehurst, she suggested a measured approach. "I think really, at the end of the day, you can try to reduce the exposures that you can control." Her point is that we shouldn't let the pervasiveness of plastics make us feel completely defeated. We can reduce plastic use where we can and incrementally get to a better place than we were before.

With that in mind, here are the kitchen items Whitehurst and I talked through—not so you can tear through your kitchen and throw it all away, but more as a guide to the less obvious places where these substances can show up.

A List of Sneaky Plastics (and Plastic-Adjacent Materials)

Tea Bags

Wait, they're just some kind of fabric or fiber, right? Well, sometimes. But many tea bags, especially those designed to hold their shape and maximize the blooming of the tea inside, are made from polypropylene instead.

Paper Coffee Cups and To-Go Containers/Packaging

Some coffee cups and to-go containers are obviously plastic, but the sneaky detail here is that even the paper ones tend to have plastic linings. "If you're in the doctor's waiting room, and you fill a [water cooler] cup that was unlined, you would know pretty much immediately," Whitehurst says as an example. I hadn't thought of it before, but she's right—all those paper cups would just drip water through their bases if they were just paper.

Parchment Paper / Nonstick (Grilling) Aluminum Foil

"It's not necessarily a plastic or plasticizer-type chemical, but it's still a synthetic polymer," said Whitehurst of the coatings on these kitchen staples. Parchment paper is designed to withstand high heat and release food easily; nonstick-treated aluminum foil, often sold as a grilling product, is also meant to do the same. Parchment is usually coated with silicone for that effect, and this patent suggests the aluminum foil is coated in silicone as well.

Canned Food Linings

Aluminum and tin cans can corrode and react with their contents. Chemical linings provide a protective barrier that prevents that, keeping the food inside safe and tasty. But there are concerns about the health effects of the linings themselves, in particular BPA. Many manufacturers avoid that specific chemical now, but related ones are still in use.

Compostable / Biodegradable Bags and Packaging (Bioplastics)

This is a funny one, because bioplastics offer the promise of freeing us from single-use plastics that take thousands of years to break down in landfills—and yet bioplastics are still a kind of plastic. They may be derived from plant sources instead of petrochemicals, but there are still plastic molecules in them, and necessarily so: If these products didn't have any plasticizers in them, they couldn't do their job because they would have no structural integrity at all. Your biodegradable compost bag can't hold your food scraps if it immediately blows a hole.

Sea Salt and Processed Sugar

Salt from the sea is a well-documented source of microplastics, sadly, because the oceans are littered with them. As for sugar, it's such a highly refined, "high-touch" product that it's likely to pick up microplastics during its production. It's not easy to extract, purify, crystallize, dry, package, and ship sugar without it picking up microplastics from machinery in the process.

Produce Stickers / Food-Label Stickers

Those tiny stickers on on individual apples, bananas, oranges, and more are made of plastic, though there are efforts to develop compostable alternatives that use less plastic.

Water Filter Cartridges

The filter cartridge housing in many home water filters is, of course, all plastic, but there's frequently plastic material in the filter medium as well. "The activated charcoal is mixed in with little plastic beads to help with the aeration effect—if the charcoal compacts, it's going to make the dripping go too slow," explains Whitehurst. The plastic beads help prevent that.

Dishwasher Detergent Pods

Dishwasher detergent pods aren't coated in pure plastic—if they were, they'd never dissolve and release the detergent within. But that clear coating is still a synthetic polymer film designed to hold its shape until it dissolves.

Scrubber Sponges

Sponges originally came from the sea, but most kitchen sponges today are synthetic. And the ones with those incredibly helpful scrubber pads? "Those are going to be typically made out of polyurethane," said Whitehurst. "You're going to have shedding of those fibers as you're cleaning, and that's going down the sink; those microfibers are being released into the wastewater."