If you like smoking dry herb, you probably have a favorite grinder at home. The one that doesn’t get stuck, or actually grinds your flower. But as a long-time smoker, you might have also bought several of these little devices as they tend to well, break.

Let’s be real here, plastic grinders are not the best way to get your buds milled. Most of the time they’ll break and stop working, have microplastics all over the place, and can be dangerous to smoke or inhale.

And if that doesn’t dissuade you from plastic grinders, you are totally wasting your precious buds and leftover kief while grinding. Pretty much all acrylic devices won’t have a catcher or pollen chamber to recover this golden dust.

So if you are buying premium indoor delta-8, delta-9, or even CBD flower, you are missing out on the delicious trichome crystals that your plastic grinder might leave behind.

In this article, we gathered the top 5 reasons why you should never use plastic grinder, and why saving a few bucks for a high-end grinder might actually enrich your smoking rituals.

Most plastic used to create grinders will lack the durability of aluminum, stainless steel, or even ceramic used in other devices. This is important because the teeth need to be sturdy enough to cut up the stems, flowers, and other parts of the bud.

This is why the sturdiness and durability of your grinder are important. Some grinders might break a tooth or two while trying to grind your favorite flower, and that’s a no-go when it comes to smoking.

If your grinder breaks, it won’t mill your herb properly to burn and your favorite bud won’t hit as you’d like to. Thus, it is important to get a grinder that can actually sustain through time, not only for your herb but also for your general health with the plastic leftovers.

Now, this might seem like a dumb thing to say but it is really important. Plastic grinders tend to break and leave shavings of themselves in the buds you grind.

This means you might smoke tiny plastic shavings with your herb, whether they burn in the process or just inhale the tiny microplastics. So either way, you are getting harmful chemicals in your bloodstream, which is highly not recommended. 

This is why metal grinders like the ones from Flower Mill are very important for dry herb smokers. They are durable and made from stainless steel that’s food-grade, making them as safe as they can get when you want to grind your buds.

One of the main reasons plastic grinders might seem useful at first, is because they’ll grind your bud easily. Well… not really. The strength of plastic teeth is limited, and you lack the design and teeth shape to actually get fluffy herb pieces.

So instead of getting a high-quality grind that will make your herb taste and hit as it’s supposed to, most of the time it will give you a mushed-up mess of nugs.

This is why specialized high-end aluminum grinders are the way to go to get better “fluff”. The Flower Mill for example progressively crumbles your product until it breaks apart. This means a more even, uniform, and “fluffy” result.

Acrylic and commercial plastic grinders are pretty simple. Which, unless you want to take the hassle and try to clean up the stuck herb between the teeth, tends to waste your bud instead of saving it.

Some high-end grinders have either a pollen chamber or a catching design, which will catch your leftovers and smallest herb pieces. Not only you’ll be saving some weed from being wasted, but you also get to accumulate delicious kief.

Kief is a powder made from the tiniest particles of the bud. It basically is the part where trichome concentrate, which in simple terms means you get a natural concentration of your dry flower. You can sprinkle this powder to your joints or buds before smoking to get that extra punch.

The Flower Mill could also help you with this, as it has a catcher with a modular design that can help to save up the tiniest of nug pieces. So by doing this, you’ll get less waste and save up some of that natural concentrate. 

The modular design of this mill can also grind to different capacities, and you can get a 4 piece set that includes a special filter before the catcher to separate the kief from tiny weed pieces. So if collecting your bud’s kief sounds interesting to you, getting a high-end device as the Flower Mill might be in your next purchase.

If you’ve seen acrylic grinders, you already know they have that cheap plastic toy feeling. As stated before, these aren’t made to last or even work towards your grinding needs.

This is why the material quality is so important. Besides the danger of inhaling microplastics, stainless steel, aluminium, and other food-grade material ensures your bud its good to use.

Besides, most of acrylic grinder you can buy, won’t have a recognizable brand that backs the product up. Sometimes this might seem like something superficial, but in the end, having a brand that can guarantee their quality will pay off in the long run. 

And as you could imagine, plastic grinders are not sustainable. So as the saying goes, you get what you pay for; plastic grinders are: a mediocre at best experience that will end up in a landfill in a month or two. 

So if you want your smoking to be a little more sustainable, plastic is a no-go.

In the end, using plastic grinders comes far back from the sketchy and sometimes dark era that was smoking weed 20 years ago. Nowadays we have better materials, design, and technology that will ensure your smoking rituals are much more enjoyable, and safer overall.

By having a grinder that will last longer, not only you’ll avoid inhaling or smoking microplastics, you’ll get better milled herb, waste less product, and even get some kief for later. 

And as we stated before, plastic is not sustainable and if you care about the planet, maybe consider a high-end grinder for a few more bucks like the Flower Mill. Its beautiful modular design with a catcher, high quality nub crumbling, and even interchangeable designs and case will make your smoking session super easy.

Do you use a premium or high-end grinder yourself? Let us know in the comments below.