There's something in tonight's dinner that isn't on the recipe. It came off your chopping board.
In 2023, researchers publishing in the American Chemical Society's Environmental Science & Technology journal asked a question nobody had properly tested: how much plastic does an ordinary chopping board shed during normal use? Not in a lab abstraction — in realistic food prep, knife on board, the way you'd dice an onion on a Tuesday.
The answer was not reassuring. Their estimates put annual exposure at 14 to 71 million polyethylene microplastic particles per person from a standard polyethylene board, and around 79 million from polypropylene. By weight, that's potentially tens of grams of plastic per year — most of it in fragments under 100 microns, far too small to see, embedding directly into the food being cut.
The mechanism is mundane. Every knife stroke scores the surface. Those score marks are where the plastic went — sheared off as micro-fragments, some into the washing-up water, some into the carrots. The more worn the board, the worse it gets. That cross-hatched, fuzzy-surfaced plastic board at the back of the cupboard isn't just tired. It's depleting into your meals.
What we know, and what we don't
We'll be straight about the science, because the science deserves it. The same study ran a preliminary toxicity test and found no significant effect on cell viability in the lab. Long-term effects of ingested microplastics in humans remain genuinely uncertain — researchers are still mapping how these particles behave in the body, though they've now been found in blood, lungs and placental tissue across a growing pile of studies.
So this isn't a scare story. It's a simpler proposition: microplastics are an ingredient nobody chose, with a risk profile nobody can yet fully define. Given the choice, most people would rather not run the experiment on their own family.
Why we build with Richlite
Our boards are made from Genuine Richlite® — paper, sustainably sourced, saturated with resin and compressed under heat and pressure into a material dense enough to have spent decades in commercial kitchens, skate parks and aerospace tooling. No plastic substrate. Nothing to shed polyethylene or polypropylene into your food. Microplastic-free, by composition rather than by marketing.
It also solves the problems that push people towards plastic in the first place. Richlite is non-porous, so it doesn't harbour bacteria in open grain the way timber can. It's warp-resistant and dishwasher-tolerant in ways wood never will be. It handles heat to 175°C, so a hot pan landing on it is a non-event. And it's hard-wearing enough that we back every Everyday board with a 10-Year Material Warranty — a number we can put in writing because the material earns it.
A chopping board is the most-used tool in most kitchens. It touches almost everything you eat. Ours adds nothing to the meal except a decent surface to make it on.
Everyday Industries boards are made from Genuine Richlite®, are microplastic-free, and carry a 10-Year Material Warranty. Browse the range [here].