Originally published at: Black plastic take-out containers may be toxic - Boing Boing
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From Gail Sherman
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Looks like I need to get carving some replacement kitchen utensils.
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Sadly ironic that this story was the related one. If they were recycled plastic it seems the cure may have been just another disease.
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We had this in the food thread the other month:
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Everything is toxic - Dose is everything. LD50 of water is ~6l
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In case you have some of this maple lying around…
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As a matter of fact…
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It’s also worth paying attention to the plastic type number in the recycle symbol. A general rule of thumb: the higher the number, the harder it is to recycle, and frequently isn’t.
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Many grocery foods–mushrooms, veggie burgers, green beans–come encased in black plastic, which I always try to save rather than adding to the waste stream. Should I throw it all out? into the earth?
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Minneapolis and Hennepin County, as well as some other places, don’t accept black plastic of any kind for recycling. Primarily because it doesn’t work with the sorting equipment, which uses reflected light to identify different types of plastic.
From the pdf at that link:
Black plastic cannot be recycled, no matter what type of plastic it is. The optical sorting equipment at recycling facilities cannot identify black plastic because it absorbs light instead of reflecting it. Additionally, black plastic has little value because it cannot be dyed to create a new color and, therefore, can be used in fewer ways Put black plastic items of any kind in the trash.
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I told my BF we need to use our plastic containers - esp the black ones - for non-food items.
I’m also wondering how safe our acrylic “glasses” and silcone kitchen thingies are.
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Those balls shouldn’t need flame retardant if they’re going onto a water reservoir, surely?
(/s just in case, because they probably add it by default anyway.)
Well, that stuff is definitely flammable. Handle with care! 
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They don’t even need to intentionally add flame retardant, all they need to do is to use recycled plastic and it comes for free, apparently!
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Having once set myself on fire, I’m all for a bit of extra flame retardant! (I had 3rd degree burns down the side of my face)
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Our city is currently trying to wean us away from the numbers. They basically sent us a flyers telling us that almost nothing plastic is recyclable, except for:
Notice that black take out containers are not pictured.
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I’d be curious how much of this is by design and how much of it is…flexible…approaches to regulatory compliance.
It’s long been the case that one of the major items on the “recycling; harder and less useful than it looks” list is that the risk of contamination(whether during use or additives for a particular purpose) tended to force ‘downcycling’ of material with every generation; with food applications generally being taken out of the picture pretty early.
Is there somewhere in the supply chain where taking stuff that has been bromated to hell and back for service in internal PSU dielectrics or airflow guides or the like and casting it into food products is actually legitimate; or just somewhere where nobody is checking very carefully(as with that rash of random pot metal applications where what sure looked like leftover tin/lead solder started showing up in quantity after ROHS requirements were taken more seriously on the electronics side)?
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