One Small Crack on a Teflon Pan Can Release Thousands of Plastic Particles

A new study shows how many tiny plastic particles might be in our food after contact with cooking utensils, with a small break on a Teflon coated pan potentially releasing as many as 9,100 particles.

Teflon-covered pots and pans can lose their coating as we use and wash them, which could be a problem during meal preparation. It's hard to know how much plastic is released.

The new research concluded that we might be dealing with a large number of plastic fragments over the course of the next century.

Youhong Tang, a mechanical and material engineer from Flinders University in Australia, says that it gives a strong warning that we must be careful about using cooking utensils.

The team used a technique called photon scattering to study the microplastics on the Teflon coating. To calculate how much of this coating might get stuck in food, they applied a number of custom software programs.

To recreate a cooking process without food, water, or oil, the researchers cut the Teflon-coated cookware into small pieces and moved turners of different materials against the cookware in cooking-like fashions.

A broken coating could cause as many as 2.3 million tiny particles to be released during meal preparation, based on 30 seconds of cooking time if a cooking turner has torn a Teflon surface

Teflon is in the family of chemicals known as "forever chemicals" that are linked to a variety of health issues.

Cheng Fang, a materials scientist at the University ofNewcastle in Australia, says that Teflon microparticles in our food may be a health concern.

While there are still questions about how common and dangerous this release of microplastics and nanoplastics might be, the researchers are calling for further investigation into the possibleContamination effects during cooking

Older cooking pots and pans may need to be put out of use after a certain time or Teflon coating may need to be made more resistant to wear and tear.

The research team acknowledges the challenge in measuring and assessing plastic particles at these small sizes. In the future, this area may be improved.

Tang says that more research is needed to address the risk assessment of the Teflon microplastics.

The science of the total environment has published the research.