Are Plastic Cutting Boards Safe? What Comes Off With the Carrots (2026)
The short answer
No. Every cut takes a little of the board with it.
You chopped carrots on it last night. That is where those bits went.
What this guide answers
What else in your kitchen is doing this?
The free 3 minute scan goes room by room. It tells you what to deal with first. No cost, no call.
Take the free home scanWhat comes off the board and into the carrots?
Quick answer: tiny bits of the board itself.
Go look at your board. The white one by the sink.
Run your thumb over it. You can feel the grooves.
Every groove is plastic that used to be there.
It did not evaporate. It came off on the knife.
A team at North Dakota State University put a number on it. Their work ran in Environmental Science & Technology in May 2023.
They chopped carrots. Then they counted what came off.
Their estimate for one person, for one year: 7.4 to 50.7 grams of plastic off a polyethylene board.
Fifty grams is under two ounces. Of plastic. In your food.
Most of the pieces were far too small to see.
Time said it plainer in November 2025. One knife stroke can release 100 to 300 bits.
About half stay on the board and wash down the drain. The other half you eat.
Which plastic is your board made of?
Quick answer: one of two, and both of them shed.
Polyethylene
The soft white board. The one that scratches easy.
The 2023 count came to 14.5 to 71.9 million bits a year.
Polypropylene
The harder board. Often colored. Often the thin bendy mats.
That one came to 79.4 million bits a year.
By weight it shed 5 to 60 percent more than polyethylene. By count, 14 to 71 percent more.
The tougher board is not the safer board.
You cannot tell which one is on your counter by looking at it.
That is the whole trouble. Nothing is printed on a cutting board.
What happened when they fed it to mice for twelve weeks?
Quick answer: the wood group came out cleanest.
The 2023 study only counted. It did not follow the plastic into a living body.
A second team did that. Their work ran in Environmental Health Perspectives in April 2025.
They chopped mouse food on three boards. Polypropylene, polyethylene, and willow wood.
Then they fed it to the mice. Four weeks for one group, twelve for another.
Here is what turned up at twelve weeks.
The polypropylene group had more inflammation markers in the blood. The gut wall measured worse too.
The polyethylene group had a shift in their gut bugs.
The wood group was the one they measured the others against.
The wood food had no plastic in it at all. The team looked and found none.
| What they measured | The number | Named source and date | What it does NOT mean |
|---|---|---|---|
| Bits off a polyethylene board | 14.5 to 71.9 million a year | Environmental Science & Technology, May 2023 | An estimate, not a real kitchen |
| Bits off a polypropylene board | 79.4 million a year | Environmental Science & Technology, May 2023 | Same study, same carrots |
| Weight over a year | 7.4 to 50.7 grams | Environmental Science & Technology, May 2023 | Not all of it stays in a body |
| Per knife stroke | 100 to 300 bits | Time, November 2025 | About half of that stays on the board |
| Mice fed food chopped on polypropylene | Inflammation up at 12 weeks | Environmental Health Perspectives, April 2025 | Mice, not people. The polyethylene group showed no clear inflammation |
| Plastic put on mouse cells in a dish | No change in 72 hours | Environmental Science & Technology, May 2023 | Cuts against my case, and it stays in |
The case against my own story
Quick answer: here is what cuts the other way.
I will not hide the parts that do not help me.
Two. Wood boards shed more bits, not fewer. In some tests, 4 to 22 times more. Those bits are wood, and no yearly figure was worked out for them.
Three. Mice are not you. Those mice ate board food at every meal for twelve weeks.
Five. The same 2025 team went looking for that plastic inside the mice. They did not find it in the liver, the gut or the colon.
So why does this still sit wrong with me?
Because of the machine they counted with.
It could only see bits bigger than 20 micrometers. North Dakota State says the smaller ones were there too.
Every number up there is a floor. Not a ceiling.
Syeed Iskander, the engineer who ran the count, told Time: "There's a lot of uncertainty."
I am not waiting for certainty about my own dinner.
So no. You are not paranoid. You are early.
What do I chop on instead?
Quick answer: wood. One board, and it lasts.
Isn't plastic in everything? Yes. It is.
That is exactly why you do not start with everything.
Change the one thing your knife lands on every day. That is it.
Get a solid wood board. Not the pressed kind held together with glue.
Wash it by hand. Stand it up to dry. Rub oil into it once a month.
Wood gets better with age. Plastic only gets worse.
And the grooved plastic one? Throw it out.
Not next month. Tonight, on your way past the bin.
You were never really choosing between two boards. You were choosing who to believe.
The board is the one thing I cannot hand you off my own shelf. Buy it once, in wood, and be done with it. Everything else your knife touches, I do buy from one place.
It is a private membership store. We are the manufacturer. No middleman, no markup. One name on it, and a person who picks up the phone.
Shannon's Advice
Straight talk from ShannonI do not call them grocery stores. They are poison centers meant to do you and your family harm. It is not just the brands who are doing the harm, it is the stores themselves. They allow these toxic products on their shelves. People are sick and dying. This is a very serious matter. How can we ever trust them again?
We can't trust them. That is where Switch to America comes in. We are a new supply chain, built on family values, trust and affordability.
You do not have to take my word for it. The proof is in my blog posts, the recalls, the lawsuits and the fines, and in the app I built called The Family Home Toxic Scorecard. Also, inside my Switch Circle private community, we talk about real solutions.
Women come to me exhausted, in pain, stressed out, and on a list of prescriptions they never wanted. I have spent over 20 years helping women get off prescription medications. I help families reclaim their health.
We cannot stop them. I have stopped expecting to. However, we can stop walking into their stores. We are linking arms and together taking our control back. Control of our health and our finances.
Start by clicking the link below and taking the SCAN.
The receipts
- Yadav, Khan, Quadir, Rusch, Mondal, Orr, Xu and Iskander, "Cutting Boards: An Overlooked Source of Microplastics in Human Food?", Environmental Science & Technology 57(22), 23 May 2023. Estimated yearly exposure of 7.4 to 50.7 grams from a polyethylene board and 49.5 grams from a polypropylene board, or 14.5 to 71.9 million and 79.4 million particles. The abstract is mirrored by the University of Southern Denmark, home of co-author Elvis Genbo Xu.
- The American Chemical Society news release on that paper, 4 June 2023. It carries the finding that cuts against this post. The polyethylene bits and the wood bits "didn't appear to significantly change mouse cells' viability in lab tests." It also states that wooden boards "sloughed off 4 to 22 times more microparticles than plastic ones."
- Gan, Chen, Yao, Lin, Juhasz, Zhou and Li, "Simulated Microplastic Release from Cutting Boards and Evaluation of Intestinal Inflammation and Gut Microbiota in Mice", Environmental Health Perspectives 133(3-4), 047004, 9 April 2025. Mice ate food chopped on polypropylene, polyethylene and willow wood boards for 4 and 12 weeks. The plastic board groups showed inflammation and gut changes the wood group did not.
- North Dakota State University, 1 December 2025. The counting equipment "could detect only larger microplastics (greater than 20 micrometer)", so exposure "could be higher than measured". Also states there is "no conclusive evidence yet showing harm from cutting-board microplastics in humans."
- Cheslow v. S.C. Johnson & Son, Inc., case 3:25-cv-03655, filed 25 April 2025 in the Northern District of California. The complaint alleges that Ziploc bags and containers made of polyethylene and polypropylene shed microplastics into food, unwarned. Allegations only. The case was dropped in August 2025 with no ruling. No court ever decided whether the bags shed plastic.
Three minutes, room by room
The free scan tells you what to fix first and what to use instead. It is the smallest first step there is.
Take the free home scanWhat else do people ask?
Does washing the board get the plastic off? About half of it. Time reported that roughly half the bits stay on the board and go down the drain when you wash it. The other half is already in the food. Washing sorts out the board, not the dinner.
Is a bamboo board the same as a wood board? No. Bamboo is a grass, cut into strips and glued into a board. The two studies here tested plastic and solid wood. Willow was the wood in the 2025 one. Solid wood is the swap with the data behind it.
My board is scratched to bits. Is that worse? The people who did the counting say to swap boards more often, or move to wood. A grooved board is a board that has already given up plastic.
Do I have to bin every plastic thing in the kitchen tonight? No. Do the board first, because a knife hits it every single day. Then find the next one. One a week is a quick pace.
Who do you become?
You become the kind of woman who knows what her food touches.
Not the whole kitchen. Just the board she uses every day.
That is enough.
And so the next swap gets easier. Then the one after that.
Keep reading
- Can you microwave Ziploc bags? What ends up in your leftovers
- Are nonstick pans toxic? What is on the pan you cook in
- Is HexClad non-toxic? What flakes into dinner when the pan overheats
- Is Dawn dish soap safe? What is really in the blue bottle
- Free: the Is My Home Toxic cheat sheet 40 products, 6 rooms.