Microplastics vs. bacterial bomb

This morning I threw my chopping board in the bin. It had been due for replacement for a while: the surface had deep cut grooves that were even starting to fray at the edges. For months I had been telling myself and my children that I really ought to replace the wretched thing, but between intention and action lies, certainly in my kitchen, a sinkful of reluctance and indolence.

What finally pushed me over the edge was a reader questions column I write weekly for the Flemish newspaper De Standaard. A reader wondered which type of chopping board she would be best off using. In short, it comes down to this: we have a choice between potential bacterial bombs made of wood, glass or steel blade-destroyers, and shedding microplastics that together form a chopping board. Wood, provided it is scrubbed by hand with soap afterwards and dried thoroughly, is preferable for everyday use.

Every time I chop my shallots on my grubby plastic board, microscopically small particles of plastic end up in the meal. Up to millions of particles per year, American scientists claim. The article was behind a paywall, so I was unable to analyse that claim critically. Nor do I know exactly how harmful those particles are. I have no idea what type of plastic my board is made from, or whether I simply excrete the tiny plastic flakes, or whether they — in the form of PFOS, PFOA, PFNA, or PFHxS — continue to roam through my cells.

‘Going by the Health Council’s latest advice, causal evidence is apparently no longer all that important’

When it comes to drinking water, the Netherlands wishes to apply a standard of 4.4 nanograms of PFOA equivalents per litre. If I were to toss those shallots into a billion litres of soup, no more than 4.4 grams of harmful plastic would be permitted to float around in it. That is 4.4 grams per 400 competition swimming pools of soup: so little that I find myself wondering how it can be harmful at all — but I shall leave that to the toxicologists. The key question now is whether my chopping away on my revolting board takes me over that limit, or not. Since I have no equipment to measure this, a new question presents itself: should I apply the precautionary principle, or keep doggedly hacking my shallots on plastic in the absence of causal evidence that this does any harm?

Going by the Health Council’s latest advice, causal evidence is apparently no longer all that important. While half of the Netherlands was crying blue murder over goat farms supposedly giving local residents pneumonia, science journalist Aliëtte Jonkers took a closer look at the RIVM research report that lies at the root of all the commotion. What she found: after eleven years of research, scientists were unable to demonstrate a causal relationship between the pneumonia cases and the goat farms. What they did produce were alarming tables of ‘estimated risks’: predictions of numbers of patients according to their own models — patients they had, however, failed to find over eleven years. Even the farmers themselves were no more likely to contract pneumonia than anyone else. Nevertheless, the Health Council considers ‘correlation’ in this case to be just as alarming as ‘causation’. Out with the goats.

As a science journalist, I find all of this highly questionable. As a mother, I looked at my filthy board and thought: ‘How desirable is it, in any case, that I’m standing here chopping plastic into my soup?’

So this afternoon I shall buy myself a potential bacterial bomb.

The American paper: Himani Yadav, et al., Cutting boards: An overlooked source of microplastics in human food?, Ecotoxicology and Public Health (2023), doi: 10.1021/acs.est.3c00924

Aliëtte Jonkers’s analysis: Bleating about virtual deaths: how the media generated manufactured outrage over goat farms (2025)