Do plastic salt grinders shed plastic into your food every time you twist them?

What's actually in it

Most cheap salt and pepper grinders use a hard plastic burr inside the cap. The salt crystals are tougher than the plastic, so every twist files off tiny shavings. Those shavings drop into the food along with the salt.

Glass body or not, the part that does the grinding is plastic. That's true for the disposable refillable kind in the spice aisle and most kitchen-store mills under twenty dollars.

What the research says

A 2026 study in Sci Total Environ tested popular plastic-headed grinders by running salt through them and counting particles in the catch. Each twist released visible flakes of plastic. Coarse pink and sea salts shed the most because the bigger crystals scrape harder against the burr.

The team found that a single grinder can release thousands of microplastic particles over its life. The flakes were small enough to swallow without noticing and big enough to show up clearly under a microscope.

Switch to a grinder with a ceramic or stainless steel burr. Both are harder than salt, so the salt does the wearing instead of the cap. You can usually see the burr if you unscrew the top.