You Can’t Always Trust Claims on ‘Non-Toxic’ Cookware

Despite growing awareness of the health and environmental concerns raised by PFAS, it’s not easy to shop for cookware without it, especially if you’re looking for something that will let you cook, say, an omelet without much cleanup. 

For example, consumers who see a “PFOA-free” claim on packaging for a nonstick pan may mistakenly assume that means it contains no PFAS at all when it may apply to just that one specific compound. Starting around 2009, U.S. manufacturers of PFOA began voluntarily halting sales of it in this country for uses where it could come in contact with food. And by the end of 2016, it was no longer used in any food packaging, cookware, or other food-related products sold in the U.S., according to the Food and Drug Administration. But based on CR’s tests and research, even products made without PFOA may not be free of it because the compound can be created as a byproduct of other PFAS.

In fact, CR’s product safety experts say that the term “PFAS-free” is misleading. “For one thing, there are literally thousands of PFAS compounds, but most tests look for less than a hundred, so it’s difficult to know if a product is free of them all,” Boring says. In addition, manufacturers may use the word “free” to indicate that the amount is below a specific level—maybe one set by a regulatory agency, for example—not that a product doesn’t have PFAS at all.

A California law that will go into effect in 2023 will ban companies from claiming in online sale listings that a cookware product is free of any one PFAS—like PFOA—if it contains any other PFAS, like PTFE. Those claims will have to be removed from packaging by 2024, when a similar law will go into effect in Colorado. Alon, the distributor of Swiss Diamond, told CR that in order to comply with the new California law, the company will be taking the PFOA-free claim off its website by the end of 2022 and its packaging by the end of 2023.  

A PTFE-free claim on a nonstick pan, however, can be more meaningful. That’s especially the case for pans with a ceramic coating. Ceramics are primarily made of silicon dioxide and other metal oxides, not PTFE or any other PFAS, says Gillian Z Miller, PhD, a senior scientist at the Ecology Center, an environment-focused nonprofit group in Michigan. An earlier study of 24 nonstick frying and baking pans she helped conduct concluded that pans with a PTFE-free label were indeed made with a ceramic coating.