For months, the media indulged in a frenzy of fearmongering, plastering headlines about toxic flame retardants supposedly hiding in your kitchen spatulas and children’s toys. CNN, The Atlantic, the LA Times and others uncritically parroted a study from the activist group Toxic-Free Future (TFF), painting an apocalyptic picture of cancer-causing chemicals contaminating recycled black plastic. It was clickbait gold—but it was also flat-out wrong.
TFF’s study wasn’t just flawed; it was a stunning failure of basic arithmetic. Their calculations inflated the supposed risk by a factor of 10, a glaring error that went unnoticed by every reporter who amplified the scare. It took a chemist—not a journalist—to expose the truth: your spatula isn’t poisoning you, and this so-called scandal was nothing but sloppy activism dressed up as science. The media’s complicity in spreading this nonsense is a damning indictment of its willingness to sacrifice facts for sensationalism.
Spatula-Gate
The faux crisis began on October 1 with publication of a headline grabbing article in the Elsevier academic journal Chemosphere on the alleged health threats from using common household products made from recycled plastic.The study purported to show that some consumer products manufactured from recycled black plastic contained “hazardous flame retardants.” A handful of speculative studies has linked these chemicals to health conditions including cancer and endocrine disruption, prompting several countries to ban them out of an abundance of caution, although no direct cause and effect has been documented in any study. The U.S., as with most countries, have set stringent cut-off levels buffered by a 10x safety factor, and none of these tested items is even close to that grey area.
The ‘chemicals will kill you’ story had all the elements reporters needed for a scandalous headline: scary chemicals hidden in popular products, crippling diseases and an industry trade group that denied any wrongdoing. A story of this nature often metastasizes — headlines would warn about the harmful chemicals lurking in your kid’s toys, and opportunistic politicians would use the fabricated scandal to further restrict the use of plastic. And for a time, that’s what happened. For almost two months, scare headlines flooded the internet spread far and wide by dozens of non-profit advocacy groups like Toxic Free Future and Beyond Plastics.
Many major outlets acted as megaphones, uncritically publishing articles citing the study. Two of the three c0-authors are affiliated with Toxic-Free Future, a well known advocacy group funded by the Park Foundation, which donates to a slew of chemophobic NGOs, funded the study. The lead author is TFF’s Science and Policy Manager, Megan Liu, who has an undergradate science degree. Erika Schneider, TFF co-worker and another co-author, has a science masters degree (nd as she notes is an “avid biker, runner and gardener”).
Unfortunately this crack team either deliberately falsified the data or made an embarrassing rookie mistake that nobody caught until two months after the study was published: they overestimated the amount of flame retardant found in recycled plastic by a factor of 10. McGill University chemist Joe Schwarcz spotted the error, as The National Post reported on December 11:
“The paper correctly gives the reference dose for [the flame retardant] BDE-209 as 7,000 nanograms per kilogram of body weight per day, but calculates this into a limit for a 60-kilogram adult of 42,000 nanograms per day. So … the estimated actual exposure from kitchen utensils of 34,700 nanograms per day is more than 80 per cent of the EPA limit of 42,000.
That sounds bad. But 60 times 7,000 is not 42,000. It is 420,000. This is what Joe Schwarcz noticed. The estimated exposure is not even a tenth of the reference dose … ‘I think it does change the flavour of the whole thing somewhat when you’re off by a factor of ten in comparing something to the reference value,’ he said.”
Put simply, you can use a plastic spatula to make pancakes without fear of poisoning your family with flame retardants.
Just a “typo”?
Risk levels used more or less globally show how ridiculous the NGO’s claim were even before the massive error was uncovered. Using TFF’s trace level findings, nobody is at risk. Using TFF’s misreported FDA risk level, which builds in a safety factor of ten, the risk was well below the far-feteched possibiliyy of being a cancer threat even if the utensils were used for cooking every day for dozens of years. Using the actual FDA level, the trace levels they found were 87% below the FDA cutoff (note that the FDA builds in a 10x safety factor, so in real life, the threat was actually 870% below a level that could cause cancer with chronic use over decades — literally no risk at all.
The ethical thing to do in this situation is to acknowledge the mistake and explain that black plastic isn’t a public health menace after all. Naturally, Toxic-Free Future did the exact opposite, actually raising the hysteria stakes. The activist group described its glaring mistake as a “typo” and insisted that “The error does not impact the study’s findings, recommendations, or conclusions.”
Chemosphere, the junk pay-to-play journal that published the bogus article, was removed from the Web of Science Index after the data misrepresentation was discovered, noting its history of publishing articles rife with mistakes and misrepresentations.
The national media’s response was arguably worse than TFF’s. As of this writing, neither CNN nor the Atlantic has bothered to correct their original coverage from October. The same goes for November stories by the New York Times and The Hill. The Times then published a second piece on December 10 explaining that “not all experts agree that these [black plastic] items are unsafe to use.” But that story still hasn’t been updated to acknowledge the flaw in TFF’s study. NBC News told the same lie by omission.
CNN published a second article on December 13, two days after Schwarcz exposed the flaw in the study. But instead of correcting her previous coverage, reporter Sandee LaMotte attacked the EPA for allowing a “Toxic chemical in black plastic utensils and toys” to “proliferate.” Note the article mentions a lawsuit that’s already been filed by ambulance-chasing tort lawyers with whom Toxic-Free Future undoubtedly (and and also unethically and without disclosure) coordinated the timing of the release of the study.
Fortunately, not all coverage was equally awful. The San Francisco Chronicle corrected its own mistaken reporting of the TFF study, and called out the national outlets that published similarly flawed coverage. Yahoo! Life put out a surprisingly helpful article explaining why the TFF paper was unrealistic and noting that “the vast majority of black plastic household items do not contain these contaminants.”
The New York Times et. al bungled the story and never issued a correction, a few news outlets take science seriously. Strikingly, Slate never bought into the anti-plastic hype. Instead, the magazine’s science columnist, an epidemiologist at the University of Wollongong, wrote that “I am still using my black plastic spatula. I have no plans to stop any time soon.”
Legacy media dying a clueless death
In years past, legacy outlets like CNN were able to control the framing of an evolving story like this. No longer. For one thing, an independent scientist like Schwarcz had a large enough platform to demolish the scare story while TFF was trying to fabricate it. That’s notable, and it speaks to the value of experts monitoring and responding to media coverage on websites like ours.
More importantly, the legacy press doesn’t seem to realize what time it is. Gallup reported in October that the public’s trust in media is at an all-time low—with just 31 percent of Americans expressing a “great deal” or “fair amount” of confidence in journalists. This distrust is reflected in declining newspaper circulation and digital subscriptions. Web traffic to the top 50 news sites is also falling rapidly as more than half of Americans report getting news from social media sites like X. The press’s rampant dishonesty–so clearly exposed by this phony scandal around black plastic–is steadily destroying their profitability and pushing them into irrelevance. We say good riddance.
Don’t be suprised if, despite the official vaporization of the article and the journal that carried it, enviornmeantlists, ideological scientists, and ambulance-chasing toxic tort lawyers will continue to cite this activist drivel as further ‘proof’ that chemicals are killing us.
David Zaruk is a Belgian-based environmental-health risk policy analyst specializing in the role of science in policy and societal issues. He blogs under the pseudonym: The Risk-Monger. Follow him on X at @zaruk
A version of this article was originally posted at The Risk- Monger and has been reposted here with permission. Any reposting should credit the original author and provide links to both the GLP and the original article. GLP editor Jon Entine updated the story to add breaking news elements and context.
