Throw Out Your Black Plastic Spatula. It’s probably leaching chemicals into your cooking oil. (Oct 2024) Article

[Michael Harrop]

https://www.theatlantic.com/health/archive/2024/10/black-plastic-spatula-flame-retardants/680452/

Cooking with any plastic is a dubious enterprise, because heat encourages potentially harmful plastic compounds to migrate out of the polymers and potentially into the food. But, as Andrew Turner, a biochemist at the University of Plymouth recently told me, black plastic is particularly crucial to avoid.

In 2018, Turner published one of the earliest papers positing that black plastic products were likely regularly being made from recycled electronic waste. The clue was the plastic’s concerning levels of flame retardants. In some cases, the mix of chemicals matched the profile of those commonly found in computer and television housing, many of which are treated with flame retardants to prevent them from catching fire.

Because optical sensors in recycling facilities can’t detect them, black-colored plastics are largely rejected from domestic-waste streams, resulting in a shortage of black base material for recycled plastic. So the demand for black plastic appears to be met “in no insignificant part” via recycled e-waste, according to Turner’s research. TV and computer casings, like the majority of the world’s plastic waste, tend to be recycled in informal waste economies with few regulations and end up remolded into consumer products, including ones, such as spatulas and slotted spoons, that come into contact with food.

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[Michael Harrop]

The OP article cites a number of studies. One of them, referred to in this part:

In a separate study, published in a peer-reviewed journal this month, researchers from the advocacy group Toxic-Free Future and from Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam found that, out of all of the consumer products they tested, kitchen utensils had some of the highest levels of flame retardants.

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Has had some corrections:
Viral paper on black plastic kitchen utensils earns second correction https://retractionwatch.com/2025/07/06/viral-paper-black-plastic-kitchen-spatula-utensils-chemosphere-second-correction/

a letter accompanying the correction suggests the latest update still fails “to completely correct the math and methodological errors present in the study,” according to Mark Jones, an industrial chemist and consultant who has been following the case. “The errors are sufficient to warrant a restating of the abstract, sections of the paper and conclusions, if not a retraction.”

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The study is:
From e-waste to living space: Flame retardants contaminating household items add to concern about plastic recycling (Sep 2024) https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S0045653524022173