Picking The Perfect Cutting Board
A modern ethical dilemma
When I moved house not that long ago, I had too little help, not enough sleep, and a massive headache from the truly impressive amount of miscommunication between everyone involved. It was in this frame of mind I thoughtlessly left my new-to-me cutting board over a hot air vent where it promptly warped.
A few rounds of sanding and soaking later, I still feared for my thumbs with every wobbly chop and decided it was time for a new one. There are many styles of cutting board, and I didn’t know what would best suit my needs. Like any responsible adult, I asked the internet for help.
The New York Times’ Wire Cutter is my go-to for most home purchases. They have helped me out with a number of items including a mop bucket, humidifier, and a smart scale. They personally test the items they review, and they’ve proven themselves trustworthy so far. I was surprised to find their favorite cutting board is plastic.
Plastic cutting boards aren’t too hard, so they don’t dull your knives quickly, and they are dishwasher-safe, but the biggest differentiator is that they are cheap. As someone who had a few major appliances about to hit their end of life, cheap was pretty appealing. But buying plastic today is like selling your soul to the Devil, right? How could I buy into the industry that kills so much ocean life?
Surely a wood board was the right choice. With proper care it could last ages — scuffs could be sanded out, breaks could be glued. When it truly breaks beyond repair, wood is compostable. And on top of everything the plastic board turned out not to be that cheap. I’m in Canada — items are often more expensive here than in the States and the difference only seems to have grown during Covid. Instead of the $30USD ($38.21CAD) posted on Wire Cutter, the plastic board was $60CAD on Amazon.ca. The wooden one was only $15CAD more. Surely, surely wood was the right choice, then, right?
On the other hand, plastic is very efficient to make. Its creation is not that environmentally taxing, and the plastic board was smaller and lighter than the wooden one which makes it more efficient to ship. Additionally, I’ve been hearing since childhood about the disaster of deforestation. A plastic cutting board can’t get lodged in a turtle’s nose, has no holes to trap marine life, and while it might attract toxins just like micro-plastics, it’s too big to be eaten by the average fish. What if plastic actually was the lesser evil?
I briefly wondered if a recycled plastic board might be a better option. In the last several years a number of plastic-producing companies have started taking back their empties for recycling, usually in partnership with Terracycle. But whether on purpose or by accident, that is apparently just greenwashing, so for my personal exercise I assumed that sustainability-wise all-plastic boards were the same, and would go with the Wire Cutter option if plastic won.
The wooden board was made of teak. Teak is a hardwood native to Southeast Asia. Its natural oils make it pest-resistant and very durable, so it’s very popular for a number of uses. A quick glance on Wikipedia says that it raises environmental concerns because the demand for teak has destroyed lots of old growth. Not looking good so far. However, teak has been naturalized to South America where there are supposedly sustainable plantations.
The company that makes the cutting board is FSC-certified for sustainability which, according to Greenpeace, is absolutely meaningless, and if we can’t trust Greenpeace, who’s left? Scratch that option off the list.
Wire Cutter only had plastic or teak boards, so I turned to another list of recommendations, this time from The Food Network. Their wooden pick was made from acacia, a hardwood native to Eastern Australia. It’s also endangered. Thank you, next.
I’ll point out here that cutting boards can be made of glass, but they aren’t worth considering because they’re terrible.
The next board was hardwood made from American maple including reclaimed headboards — amazing! That must be the one! Except it was no longer sold. The company only offers one chopping board this year, and it seems to be made from virgin material. It’s also $185CAD after taxes. That’s a no from me.
There was also a bamboo pick. It was declared to be sustainable simply because it’s bamboo. Today bamboo is the antithesis of plastic. It is propped up as the best material for just about everything because it grows very easily and very quickly. And like other plants, it absorbs carbon and is compostable. But of course, there’s more to it than that. Most bamboo comes from China which, relative to me in particular, is halfway around the world. The environmental cost of shipping is not trivial. China isn’t known to be the most concerned with the environment, and even a crop as earth-friendly as bamboo can be mismanaged.
The love of bamboo from the modern tree-hugger tends to focus on its growth, but its earth-friendliness after harvest is entirely up to the manufacturer. To fully understand the environmental impact of this board we must understand what chemicals were used to process it, how many destinations the component parts traveled before they would be assembled and dropped at my doorstep, and whether the other ingredients like glues and oils are as compostable as the raw plant matter. Perhaps it’s a safe assumption that virgin bamboo is a greener choice than virgin wood, but how does it compare to plastic? The blurb about the board on the company website answered none of these questions, nor did the company make any real claims about sustainability. Not very reassuring.
Then came something completely new to me: a purportedly commercial-grade board made of paper composite; a material used in skateboard ramps, home siding, and countertops. At first glance, it seemed like an obvious winner. The paper it’s made from is recycled, it’s dishwasher-safe, heat-resistant to 350º F, and not particularly expensive — the largest available size with anti-skid grips came to about $90CAD. The basic model is available for $30CAD.
But here things get dicey. The recycled paper alone is not very durable. To make the paper usable they mix it with resin. Resins are known to be stable once fully cured, but they can be very toxic while drying. Many are also not biodegradable which brings us right back to the plastic disposal problem. The company that makes the base of these boards is Richlite. Their website has a few notes on the sustainability of the resin they use, but we all know you can’t take what a company boasts at face value and I don’t have a chemist on-hand to evaluate their claims. They also note that the paper they use is FSC-certified, which as we learned from Greenpeace, doesn’t mean much. So was this board really any better than the other options?
I don’t know; I stopped looking. Because I simply had other things to do. I do not have unlimited time to learn all the chemistry and environmental science needed to really evaluate all these options. In the end, even if I got a completely 100% guaranteed optimally “green” cutting board, it wouldn’t save the planet. And it doesn’t matter anyway because that product can’t exist. I like to think that part of the value of buying “green” (or green-er, or green-ish) products is that they create a trend. Any individual action doesn’t matter in the grand scheme of things, but they can add up, so there is value in starting the habit. And the habit can cross personal boundaries. If someone sees me making a more sustainable choice, perhaps it will lead them to make the same choice, or at least know there is a greener option available. In this particular instance, though, as we’ve seen, you can’t tell how sustainable a cutting board is by looking. If your cutting board isn’t plastic or glass, they all kind of look the same — brown.
One of the best ways to be kind to the earth is to just consume less. Perhaps, in that case, the best thing I could do is pick the most durable board I could afford and treat it well, in the hopes it would last the rest of my lifetime.
In the end, I settled on the paper composite board because to the best of my very limited knowledge, it was the most earth-friendly choice. I will likely never know if it really was the greenest option, and I’ll just have to live with the mystery. All I can do now is make sure not to leave it too close to any heating vents.