Food Standards Agency
Saturday 4 July 2009
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Listen to this siteDetails of the Agency-funded chemical contaminants from food contact materials and articles research programme.
This internationally recognised research helps the Agency to assess what action needs to be taken to protect consumers as a result of the migration of chemicals from packaging, cookware and other materials and articles that are intended to come into contact with foodstuffs. This helps the Agency to achieve its objectives by ensuring that:
New research commissioned for FY 2008/2009 includes work on:
The results of such research work improve consumer protection, for example in reviewing and developing European Union controls. This programme also:
The purpose of this research programme is to ensure that chemical migration from food contact materials and articles into foodstuffs does not endanger health. As well as providing information and practical methods to help the Agency meet its consumer safety objectives, this programme helps to provide a sound scientific basis for UK input to negotiations in Europe. The programme includes the quantification of chemical migration and the development of appropriate methods of analysis, as well as more fundamental work to understand the factors affecting chemical migration.
This work helps the Food Contact Materials Unit in the Food Standards Agency to:
The Working Party on Materials and Articles in Contact with Food or Drink helps to ensure that work in this programme relates to current practice in industry and elsewhere. The activities of the working party are currently structured around an annual meeting held in the spring. The meeting reviews research projects in progress and considers future research needs.
Careful planning allows research to contribute to the discussions in Europe about legislation. EU and UK law on food contact materials and articles requires industry to ensure that food is safe and wholesome. It does this for food contact materials and articles by requiring that their use does not lead to transfer of their constituents into food so as to endanger health or affect food quality. Food contact materials and articles includes items such as food packaging, cookware, cutlery, tableware, work surfaces, and food processing machinery and equipment. The materials and articles are in their finished state, which may include, for example, printing inks, coatings and adhesive labels. Specific EU Directives are now in place for plastics, ceramics, BADGE, GMP and regenerated cellulose film in contact with food.
The wide-ranging nature of this particular research programme reflects the many different types of food contact materials and articles. Projects vary from investigating specific chemical migrants from materials and articles to the development of appropriate test protocols. As well as making a major contribution to consumer protection this research programme helps to lower trade barriers by contributing to the harmonisation of EU controls.
On-going work includes a project on colourants (A03066) which follows on from an earlier study (A03045) that provided a first step in identifying the substances that are most likely to migrate from colourants used in plastic packaging from food. This research project will investigate the effect of common additives, particularly slip and anti-static agents on the migration of colourants from food contact plastics. Selected colourants from different world-wide sources will be screened for potential migrants. Plastic test samples will be prepared using some of the selected colourants and incorporating additives commonly used in plastic formulations. Migration from the test samples will be tested using appropriate food simulants and test conditions and the values compared against those obtained from plaques prepared without additives.
A previously published Food Standards Agency-funded project (A03051) quantified the packaged food intake of children and the use of associated food contact materials. Additional work has now been commissioned (A03067) to measure the average daily intake of packaged food (by kilogram bodyweight) of older adults and students. The conventional EU approach to assessing exposure of migrants from food contact materials and articles is based on the assumption that 1 kg of packaged food is eaten every day, by a person of 60 kg body weight. The information obtained will be used to inform future exposure assessments and will be available for the recently funded FP7 FACET project.
Research already in progress includes:
Research reports published in 2006 can be found in the related links at the bottom of this page.
Name
: Mr Edward Potter
Tel
: 020 7276 8550
Email
:
edward.potter@foodstandards.gsi.gov.uk
Details of Agency-funded projects under the Food Contact Material research programme (A03).
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