PTFE / Teflon

PTFE is genuinely inert at the temperatures food is actually cooked at, and FDA clears perfluorocarbon resins for repeated food-contact use under 21 CFR 177.1550, with extraction limits of 3.1 mg per square decimetre total and 0.46 mg per square decimetre as fluoride. The famous worry, PFOA, was a processing aid rather than an ingredient of the finished coating, and it is gone: the eight manufacturers in EPA's 2010/2015 PFOA Stewardship Program committed to a 95% reduction by 2010 and full elimination by 2015, and all eight reported meeting it, so a pan bought new in the US or EU in the last decade was not made with PFOA. What has not gone away is that PTFE is itself a fluoropolymer, and therefore a PFAS under the definitions regulators now write laws around. Industry argues that a high-molecular-weight, insoluble polymer is a different proposition from the mobile short-chain PFAS that contaminate drinking water; that argument has not persuaded the legislatures now writing category-wide bans, and Minnesota has prohibited the sale of cookware with intentionally added PFAS since 1 January 2025, extending to essentially all products in 2032 unless the state rules a use unavoidable. On swallowing flakes from a scratched pan, there is no evidence of harm from the polymer itself and very little research either way - but a scratched coating is a coating that is leaving the pan, which is why we treat any PTFE food-contact surface as disqualifying rather than merely noted.

This is where PTFE actually matters, and the numbers are specific. The coating starts releasing fumes at around 260C (500F), which an empty pan on a hot burner reaches within a few minutes. Human symptoms generally do not begin until about 350C (662F), pyrolysis proper starts around 400C (752F), and above 500C the breakdown products include hydrogen fluoride and carbonyl fluoride. The resulting polymer fume fever is a flu-like illness - fever, aches, breathlessness, chest tightness, dry cough - that appears 12 to 24 hours after exposure and usually clears within another day or two. Birds are far more sensitive: in controlled exposures, pyrolysis products from heated PTFE cookware caused acute respiratory distress, pulmonary haemorrhage and rapid death in budgerigars, which is why keeping a parrot in the same airspace as a nonstick pan is a genuinely bad idea. Ordinary cooking - oil in the pan, food in the pan, moderate heat - stays well below these thresholds. Preheating empty and searing hard do not.

A dark grey or black, waxy, uniformly smooth coating on aluminium is PTFE, and if a pan is sold as nonstick without saying ceramic, assume PTFE. The lookalike is sol-gel "ceramic" nonstick, usually a lighter speckled grey, cream or colour, slightly more matte, and silica-based rather than a fluoropolymer - a different material with a different failure mode, tracked separately here. Marketing language is the real tell: "PFOA-free" only means the obsolete processing aid was not used and says nothing about whether the coating is PTFE, whereas "PFAS-free" or "fluorine-free" is a claim about the coating itself. If a spec sheet just says nonstick, ask directly whether the coating contains any fluoropolymer.

The coating is the consumable part of the pan. Metal utensils, stacking, abrasive scrubbers, high dry heat and dishwasher cycles all wear it, and once it is scratched it is releasing material: a 2022 Raman-imaging study of scratched nonstick cookware estimated that thousands to millions of PTFE micro- and nanoplastic particles could be released during a simulated cooking process. Wooden or silicone utensils, moderate heat, hand washing and not stacking pans bare will meaningfully extend its life, but a nonstick pan is a wear item measured in years, not the lifetime purchase that cast iron, carbon steel or clad stainless is. Once it is scratched through to the metal it is finished.

A coated pan is a composite - fluoropolymer bonded to aluminium or steel - and no curbside programme wants it. Scrap metal yards will sometimes take one, because the metal has value and the coating burns off in the furnace. In practice most worn nonstick pans go to landfill, where PTFE does not break down on any human timescale.