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Approaches to assess risk and assign priorities to chemicals used to make food contact materials

Project Code: A03023

07/03/2011

Central Science Laboratory
Castle, L

In this project, a wide variety of information sources was used to assess the feasibility of providing a structured, tiered approach to estimating potential exposure to chemicals that may migrate from food contact materials. The approach used progressively refined assumptions, calculations and, finally, actual migration, usage and food consumption data where available. The utility of the approach was tested for 6 substances for which some exposure information was available. The substances, chosen to cover a variety of technological roles, were: bisphenol A, benzophenone, di(2-ethylhexyl) adipate, styrene, polyethyleneglycol 2,4,7,9-tetramethyl-5-decyn-4,7-diol ether, and
crotonic acid.

Detailed information is not yet available on the extent of use of substances used to make food contact materials. Therefore it is not possible to prioritise in any general way, those chemicals that are used widely and so require a full risk assessment ompared with any chemicals that are perhaps used so little that an abbreviated risk assessment could be made. Furthermore, at present and for important monomers and additives used to make plastics, there is no generally acceptable alternative when assessing consumer exposure, than conducting food surveys to obtain concentration data and coupling this information with detailed statistics on dietary habits to calculate reliable estimates of intake.

Final report

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