Materials
Every product page breaks a thing down part by part and names the material each part is made of. This is the glossary behind those names: what each one actually is, whether it counts as plastic, how it behaves when things get hot, and how to tell it from the lookalike it's often confused with.
Metals
Steel, iron, aluminum, copper and friends — the backbone of durable plastic-free gear.
Aluminum
A light, soft, highly heat-conductive metal, used bare, anodized, or coated. It shows up as moka pot bodies, camp cookware,…
Anodized Aluminum
Aluminum whose own surface has been electrochemically converted into a thick, hard layer of aluminum oxide. The distinction that…
Brass
A copper-zinc alloy that casts and machines easily and holds a pressure-tight thread, which is why it is the default metal for…
Carbon Steel
The same iron-and-carbon chemistry as cast iron, below the 2% carbon line that defines cast iron - a de Buyer MINERAL B pan, for…
Cast Iron
An iron-carbon alloy carrying more than 2% carbon - the threshold that separates cast iron from steel - poured into a mould…
Copper
Soft reddish metal, the best heat conductor in ordinary kitchen use. In products it appears as heating elements and water tubing…
Metal
Not a material so much as an honest placeholder: a component we have confirmed is metal, where the manufacturer never said which…
Plated / Coated Steel
Ordinary carbon steel carrying a thin metallic surface layer rather than a plastic or fluoropolymer one. This is what…
Stainless Steel
The default food-grade stainless steel - an austenitic chromium-nickel alloy running roughly 18-20% chromium and 8-10.5% nickel,…
Stainless Steel
304 with 2-3% molybdenum added and a little more nickel - roughly 16-18% chromium and 10-14% nickel. The molybdenum buys one…
Stainless Steel
Our honest catch-all for a part that is clearly stainless steel but whose alloy nobody has stated - no grade on the spec sheet,…
Steel
Catch-all for parts a manufacturer calls simply steel - not stainless, not plated, not a named grade. Common on traditional…
Titanium
A light, strong, corrosion-proof metal, used in consumer goods mostly as commercially pure Grade 1 or Grade 2 sheet. It shows up…
Zinc Alloy
A die-casting alloy of roughly 96% zinc and 4% aluminum, universally called zamak and colloquially called pot metal. It pours…
Glass
Inert and non-leaching; the trade-off is always weight and breakage.
Borosilicate Glass
Glass made with boron trioxide in place of some of the soda and lime, which cuts its thermal expansion to roughly a third that…
Soda-Lime Glass
Ordinary glass: roughly 73% silica with about 13% sodium oxide and 10% calcium oxide, and about 90% of all glass made. It is the…
Tempered Glass
Not a different glass but a different treatment: a finished piece, almost always soda-lime, is reheated and then chilled fast so…
Ceramic & enamel
Fired clay and glass-on-metal surfaces — inert, but the glaze is where lead questions live.
Ceramic / Stoneware / Porcelain
Clay shaped and fired hard, usually with a thin layer of glass - the glaze - fused over it in a second firing. The family splits…
Porcelain Enamel
Powdered glass fused onto metal by firing, usually between 750 and 850C, so the cooking surface is glass and the strength…
Wood & hard plant
Solid wood, bamboo and cork. Watch the glues, and watch for "fiber" composites.
Bamboo
A woody grass, not a tree, milled into strips and glued into boards, utensils, brush handles, and lids. The commercial species…
Cork
The outer bark of the cork oak, stripped from the living tree and used for bottle stoppers, jar and bottle lid seals, gaskets,…
Wood
Solid hardwood, cut and shaped into cutting boards, spoons, spatulas, bowls, brush bodies, and tool handles. The species used…
Plant fibers
Cotton, hemp, coir, sisal and the rest — what plastic-free brushes, cloths and clothing are made of.
Cellulose
Plant fiber regenerated from wood pulp, pressed into the soft absorbent sponges and Swedish dishcloths sold as the plastic-free…
Coconut Coir
Coarse fiber from the husk of a coconut, used as stiff scrubbing bristles on natural pot brushes and bundled into round…
Cotton
The natural cellulose fiber that grows as a seed hair on the cotton plant, and the workhorse plastic-free textile for anything…
Hemp
A bast fiber - the long structural fiber from the bark layer of the hemp stalk, not a seed hair like cotton - spun into canvas,…
Luffa
The fibrous internal skeleton of a mature luffa gourd, dried out to leave a stiff open mesh of plant fiber. It is a cucurbit,…
Lyocell
A manufactured fiber spun from dissolved wood pulp - cellulose taken out of wood, dissolved whole in a solvent, and precipitated…
Palm Fiber
Stiff bristle fiber taken from palm leaf stalks and sheaths, used for the scrubbing bristles of heavy-duty pot and dish brushes.…
Paper
Pressed cellulose fiber, normally from wood pulp, and the workhorse consumable of an otherwise plastic-free kitchen: coffee…
Sisal
Hard leaf fiber from the agave sisalana plant, used for the bristles of some natural dish and bottle brushes and woven into…
Tampico Fiber
A fine, water-hungry natural fiber pulled from the inner leaves of the agave lechuguilla, which grows wild in the semi-desert of…
Animal-derived
Wool, silk, leather, bristle. Natural fibers with real performance, and their own ethical questions.
Boar Bristle
Stiff keratin hair from pigs and boars, sorted by length and stiffness and set into brush heads - the bristle the world used…
Leather
Animal hide preserved by tanning, which cross-links the collagen so the hide stops rotting and stays flexible. The grade names…
Merino Wool
Wool from Merino sheep, graded by fiber diameter rather than by breed alone: ultrafine below 15.5 microns, superfine 15.6-18.5,…
Silk
A protein filament spun by silkworm larvae to build their cocoons, then reeled off and twisted into yarn. Raw silk is roughly…
Wool
The keratin fleece fiber of sheep, sorted commercially by fiber diameter. This page covers wool in general - the coarser grades…
Rubber & silicone
The flexible sealing materials. Where a truly plastic-free build most often has to compromise.
EPDM Rubber
A synthetic rubber made by copolymerising ethylene and propylene with a small amount of a diene termonomer, which gives the…
Natural Rubber / Latex
Latex tapped from the Hevea brasiliensis tree and vulcanised into an elastomer - one of the very few soft, stretchy materials in…
Silicone
A synthetic elastomer built on a silicon-oxygen backbone instead of the carbon backbone that defines a plastic. The silicon…
Coatings
Applied surface layers — the thing that makes a pan nonstick, and the thing that eventually wears off.
Plastics
The resins we find in the contact path. Documented here so the breakdown on each product page names them precisely.
Elastane
Elastane is the stretch fibre in nearly all modern clothing: a polyurethane elastomer of flexible polyether blocks joined to…
Melamine Foam
A rigid open-cell foam made from melamine-formaldehyde resin, a thermoset, and best known as the "magic eraser" cleaning pad.…
Nylon
Nylon is a synthetic polyamide - a plastic built from repeating amide links, sold to manufacturers as PA 6 or PA 6,6. It is…
PEX
Flexible plastic water tubing made from polyethylene whose chains have been chemically cross-linked into a permanent network,…
Phenolic Resin
A thermoset made by curing phenol with formaldehyde into an irreversible cross-linked network - the original Bakelite chemistry,…
PLA
A plant-derived thermoplastic polyester, fermented from corn or sugarcane sugars and sold as the "compostable" alternative to…
Plastic
This is our honest catch-all for a component we have confirmed is plastic but whose resin the manufacturer does not state. It…
Polyester
Polyester is polyethylene terephthalate (PET) - the same polymer as a drinks bottle, either moulded into a container or…
Polypropylene
Polypropylene is the workhorse food-contact plastic: a stiff, waxy polyolefin that carries resin identification code 5 and…
Polyurethane Foam
A synthetic foam made by reacting a polyol with a diisocyanate while a blowing agent - usually water, which releases CO2 -…
Polyvinyl Alcohol
A synthetic, water-soluble polymer - a plastic. It is made by hydrolysing polyvinyl acetate rather than by polymerising a…
PTFE / Teflon
Polytetrafluoroethylene, the original nonstick: a fluoropolymer whose carbon-fluorine backbone is so unreactive that nothing…
Tritan
Eastman's branded copolyester, a clear rigid plastic polymerised from dimethyl terephthalate, 1,4-cyclohexanedimethanol and…
Other materials
Everything else we track — waxes, filtration carbon, and the one-offs that fit no family cleanly.