Is it plastic?

Yes, polypropylene is a plastic — resin code 5, and one of the more thermally stable food plastics. That stability is exactly why it ends up in the containers people microwave, which is where its problems start.

Yogurt pots · Reusable food containers

Yes. Polyethylene is the most-produced plastic on earth and the polymer most often detected in human tissue — it was the plastic found in 58.4% of carotid plaques in the 2024 NEJM study.

Food-storage bags · Milk and juice jugs

Yes, HDPE is a plastic — the rigid, opaque grade of polyethylene, resin code 2. It is chemically stable and free of PET's antimony catalyst, but it is soft enough to scratch and is usually used for multi-day formats.

Milk and juice jugs · Shampoo and detergent bottles

Yes — LDPE is the soft, flexible grade of polyethylene, resin code 4, and it is the material of films, bags and squeeze bottles. It has the highest food-contact surface area per gram of anything in a kitchen.

Food-storage and freezer bags · Cling film

Yes, and it is the single most-measured microplastic source in the food supply. PET is the clear plastic of drinks bottles, and bottled water in PET has been counted at roughly 240,000 particles per litre.

Water and soft-drink bottles · Salad and berry clamshells

Yes, Tritan is a plastic — a copolyester made by Eastman. It is genuinely BPA-free, which is a claim about a leached chemical and not about particle shedding. Those are two different questions and they get conflated constantly.

Reusable water bottles · Blender jugs

Yes, and it is the worst-behaving common food plastic. Polystyrene is brittle, abrades into visible flakes, performs badly with heat, and is used mainly for hot drinks and raw meat trays.

Takeaway hot cups and clamshells · Raw meat trays

Yes, and it is the one plastic where the particle question is not even the main question. Flexible PVC is soft because of added plasticisers, and those plasticisers migrate into fatty food.

Commercial and deli cling film · Blister packs

Yes, and it is the material the whole BPA panic was about — polycarbonate is made from bisphenol A. It has largely left consumer drinkware, but it is still in water-cooler bottles, older reusables and some appliance parts.

Water-cooler bottles · Pre-2010 reusable bottles

Yes. ABS is the tough, matte plastic of appliance housings, kettle bodies and blender bases. It is rarely in direct food contact — but on a kettle or coffee maker it is often in the hot-water path, which is not the same as being out of the way.

Kettle bodies and lids · Coffee-maker reservoirs and hot-water paths

Yes. Nylon is a polyamide, and it holds an unwelcome record: nylon mesh tea bags released about 11.6 billion microplastic particles into a single cup of tea at 95°C, the largest single-item measurement in the food literature.

Pyramid and "silken" tea bags · Cooking utensils and spatulas

Yes — polyester fabric is PET spun into fibre. It is the same polymer as a drinks bottle, and its exposure route is different: a washing machine, a tumble dryer and the air in your home rather than your food.

Clothing and activewear · Fleece

Yes. Acrylic is a hard, glass-clear plastic used for tumblers, drinkware and display pieces that look like glass. It is more brittle than polycarbonate and crazes into fine surface cracks with age and dishwasher use.

Acrylic tumblers and outdoor drinkware · Salad bowls and serving pieces

Yes, melamine is a plastic — a thermoset resin, usually with a wood-flour or paper filler. It is the material of unbreakable picnic and children's tableware, and it must never go in a microwave.

Picnic and outdoor tableware · Children's plates and bowls

Yes. EVA is a soft, rubbery copolymer used for foam, flexible tubing, gaskets and the squishy liners of lunch bags and shoes. It is a polyethylene copolymer, so it behaves broadly like a very soft polyethylene.

Insulated lunch-bag liners · Foam mats and shoe soles

Yes. Polyurethane appears in the home mostly as foam and as coatings — mattresses, sofa cushions, sponges and sealed wood finishes — which makes it a dust and air exposure rather than a food one.

Mattress and cushion foam · Kitchen sponges

Yes — PTFE is a plastic, specifically a fluoropolymer, and non-stick particles are microplastics with fluorine attached. An intact coating sheds very little; a damaged one released up to 2.3 million particles in minutes of testing.

Non-stick frying pans and bakeware · Air-fryer baskets and crisper plates

Yes — PLA is a plastic, and "plant-based" and "compostable" are claims about where it came from and where it can go, not about what it does in your cup. It is a polymer and it fragments like one.

Compostable cups and cup linings · Clear deli and salad containers

Technically not a plastic in the usual sense — silicone is a siloxane, built on a silicon-oxygen backbone rather than a carbon chain. It is more thermally stable than any common plastic, and it is also far less studied.

Bakeware and moulds · Baby-bottle teats and pacifiers

No. Natural rubber is harvested latex from the rubber tree, not a synthetic polymer, so it is not a microplastic source. Synthetic rubber is a different material entirely and is one.

Baby-bottle teats and pacifiers · Jar and bottle seals

No microplastics at all — steel is a metal and cannot shed a polymer. The catch is the parts around it: a steel bottle is only as clean as its lid, and the lid is almost always plastic.

Water bottles and thermoses · Cookware and utensils

The metal sheds nothing. Almost every aluminium food container has a thin polymer or lacquer liner between the metal and the contents, though — so a can removes the bottle-wall problem and replaces it with a much smaller liner question.

Drinks and food cans · Coffee capsules

No polymer of any kind. A seasoned cast-iron or carbon-steel pan builds its own non-stick surface out of polymerised cooking oil, which is the only non-stick surface in a kitchen that is not a plastic coating.

Frying pans and skillets · Dutch ovens

No polymer touches the contents, which makes glass the cleanest widely available food material. Worth knowing: glass bottles measured around 50 particles per litre in the one study that compared formats — from the cap and the filling line, not the glass.

Bottles and jars · Food-storage containers

Fired, glazed ceramic sheds no polymer. "Ceramic non-stick" cookware is a different thing — a sol-gel silica coating on metal, which is not PTFE and is also not the same as a stoneware dish.

Plates, bowls and mugs · Bakeware and casserole dishes

No plastic to shed. Wood was the comparison arm in the study that measured plastic cutting boards, and it is the reason that study reads the way it does — a wooden board generates wood particles.

Cutting boards · Spoons, spatulas and utensils

Depends entirely on the product, and the marketing will not tell you. Bamboo boards are strips glued with resin. "Bamboo fibre" tableware is usually bamboo powder bound in melamine resin — which is a plastic dish with bamboo in it.

Cutting boards · Utensils

Uncoated paper sheds no polymer. The problem is that most paper that touches food is not uncoated — cups, cartons and many takeaway boxes carry a polyethylene or PLA lining you cannot see.

Coffee cups (lined) · Beverage cartons (lined)

No. Cotton and linen are cellulose fibres — they shed fibres, and those fibres are not microplastics. Blends are the trap: a 60/40 cotton-polyester shirt sheds polyester.

Clothing and bedding · Towels and cloths

No polymer. A beeswax wrap is cotton impregnated with beeswax, tree resin and oil — the direct replacement for the one kitchen product with the highest food-contact surface area of all.

Wrapping cheese and cured meat · Covering bowls