Comprehensive analysis of migrates from food-packaging materials: a challenge

Abstract

The premise is put forward that present European regulation of food-packaging materials does not provide the assessment for safety corresponding to the opinion of toxicologists that migrants ingested in amounts exceeding a threshold of 1.5 μ g day -1 should be identified and toxicologically evaluated. Many substances that migrate (the large majority of the components migrating from can coatings) are neither starting point materials, nor obvious derivatives therefrom, and are, therefore, not covered by existing systems based on positive lists. Safety presupposes the comprehensive analysis of the migrating substances, ultimately to the limits in terms of concentration and molecular weight considered to be of toxicological concern. This is a new analytical challenge. In this paper, expected problems are discussed, leading to the conclusion that it will be difficult to achieve comprehensive analysis down to the concentrations presently considered safe, but that systematic work should start to define the possibilities and limitations of analytical chemistry for a migrateoriented coating legislation.