Every material has a job it wins. Here's the honest scorecard, from a brand that obviously has a favorite but promises to show its work.
| Glass (borosilicate) | Inert, no leaching or shedding ever. See-through, fridge, microwave, and table ready. Heavier; can break on hard floors. |
|---|---|
| Stainless steel | Inert and unbreakable. Light for its strength. Opaque, no microwave; dents rather than breaks. Low grades can react slightly with long acid contact. |
| Plastic | Lightest and cheapest up front. Shatterproof. Scratches into micro-particles, clouds, stains, absorbs odors, degrades with dishwasher heat. Replaced every few years. |
| Food storage | Glass. Longest contact time is exactly where you don't want plastic; glass goes fridge to microwave to table. |
|---|---|
| Mixing bowls | Steel for vigorous work and drops; glass when the bowl doubles as the serving bowl. |
| Salad spinner | Glass bowl. Greens soak and spin against the bowl, then ideally store in it. Visibility, storage, and serving all favor glass - it's why we built the Jarelli around one. Steel spinner bowls are a solid second. |
| Cutting boards | Wood. Neither glass (kills knives) nor plastic (highest-shedding item in the kitchen). |
| Kids' dishes, picnics | Plastic or steel. Breakage risk honestly outweighs contact-time concerns here. |
| Lids, mechanisms, gaskets | Engineered plastic, BPA-free. There is no glass pump mechanism. Judge products by what the food touches, not by a zero-plastic purity test. |
Plastic wins the day you buy it and loses every year after. A $25 plastic spinner that clouds and gets replaced every 3-4 years costs more over a decade than one $52 glass spinner that doesn't age - before counting the storage containers the glass bowl replaces. Buy-once tools are cheaper; they just front-load the bill.
Glass and steel tie: both are inert under normal kitchen use. Plastic is the only one of the three that sheds particles when scratched and degrades with heat. See our full piece on plastic spinners and microplastics for what the research does and doesn't show.
Borosilicate glass (lab and premium bakeware grade) handles thermal shock and daily knocks well; it's ordinary soda-lime glass that chips if you look at it wrong. Drop any glass on tile and physics wins, so households with stone floors and small children may reasonably prefer steel.
Kids, picnics, camping, and components. Plastic is a fine engineering material and a poor food-contact surface. The distinction resolves most kitchen-material debates.