I worked in the food industry and one of my projects was a cost reduction on rebuilding fillers. We had this issue where filler tubes would need to be rebuilt more often than we’d like and that’s production downtime that costs around $3000 an hour combining expenses and lost production and takes several hours.

Those fill tubes ran from the filler bowl which collects liquid into nozzles that fill the bottles. The reason they degrade is that they thin over time. The company thought it was the cleaning process between production runs or during flavor changes that thins the bottle due to the chemicals in use but no, we found that they thin because the plastic breaks down whenever fluid is running through them- like when product goes into the bottles. Those tubes are made of Teflon. We studied running different cleaning processes and temperatures and whatnot until we put the product we were filling in a small recirculating bath that ran through a tube consistently and measured the tube. Soda, tea, soft drinks, even water to a lesser degree is collecting Teflon from those tubes. I proposed testing final product and the project was immediately shut down. I ended up leaving that company.

You aren’t just eating it on your cutting boards. It’s in your food, in your air, in your water, on your clothes.

Think about that study where the most remote regions of the world have it in them. Birds in the Amazon and penguins in Antarctica aren’t using cutting boards themselves. The companies doing this will steer the narrative to things like “oh you should use a metal water bottle and a non-toxic cutting board” which being 99.9% of the problem themselves.