Best Plastic-Free Food Storage Containers

The glass base is great, but the plastic snap lid contacts food and steam and degrades over time. For a glass base with a glass lid, see the food-storage pick, the Urban Green glass container; for fully plastic-free, the Weck jars.

The most common false-sense-of-safety in the kitchen. The glass base is fine, but the lid is plastic - and hot food and steam contact it, plus it degrades and can shed microplastics over time. If you already own these, the cheap fix is to not microwave with the lid on and to store fully cooled food; but the lid is why they're not a plastic-free pick.

The thing this whole category replaces. The entire container contacts food, warm leftovers and acidic/fatty foods accelerate leaching, and "microwave-safe" only means it won't melt, not that nothing migrates.

Marketed as natural, but "bamboo fiber" tableware and containers are bamboo powder bound in melamine-formaldehyde resin - a plastic, banned for food contact in the EU. Solid bamboo is fine; the composite is not.

A genuinely good plastic-free move with one important caveat. Older Pyrex and CorningWare baking/storage dishes came with real glass lids - a true-glass-lid solution you can still find secondhand for a few dollars, and the fix for the modern plastic-snap-lid problem. But buy CLEAR glass only: vintage painted/decorated exteriors can contain lead and cadmium in the paint (a surface concern, especially if chipped or worn), so skip the decorated pieces and stick to plain clear glass with a plain glass lid.

Solid glass bodies with a glass or glass-and-plastic lid and a gasket - a step up from all-plastic-lid sets when the lid is glass, but most everyday versions still use a plastic snap lid with a silicone/plastic gasket, so they land in the same "great glass base, compromised lid" tier as other glass storage. Fine to own; check whether the specific set has a true glass lid before treating it as plastic-free.