2025-04-25 14:34:09
2025-04-23 07:02:24
2025-04-23 07:02:24
497467
Common plastics tier list, from a guy who basically doesn't know what he's talking about:
S tier:
- Polyethylene (HDPE, LDPE): Fucking excellent. I am pretty confident that polyethylene is just totally safe; I don't mind that it's used all over the place. You can basically look at the chemical structure and go "yep, seems obviously fine."
A tier:
- Silicone (polysiloxane): Sliiightly less trustworthy than polyethylene, biochemically speaking. But very very useful, and nowhere near as scary as later entries.
B tier:
- Nylon: Pretty cool plastic for fabrics. Strong, not a huge amount of health concerns, though it's hard to say for sure.
C tier:
- PTFE (Teflon): Extremely useful as a dry lubricant / non-stick coating, e.g. in non-stick pans. Unfortunately this might mean that it's especially likely to accumulate in you, since probably most of the food you eat was in contact with PTFE while cooking; worse, PTFE decomposes into less-stable things at plausible cooking temperatures. Vaguely recommend avoiding.
D tier:
- Polyester (e.g. PET, but others also). It is hard to avoid polyester in clothing and bedding, which kinda sucks because it probably lets off a bunch of endocrine disruptors during regular use.
F tier:
- Things with BPA in them: idk man, I would prefer if my food storage plastics (e.g. aluminum can linings) didn't basically act like a constant low-level estrogen supplement.
- PFASs (other than PTFE): This is a big category and other than PTFE there's no obvious single PFAS to call out and research, but the whole situation with them seems sketchy to me.
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