Food Contact Materials and Plasticisers

Food contact materials are all materials and articles intended to come into contact with foodstuffs so they also cover cutlery, dishes, processing machines and containers. The term also covers materials and articles in contact with water intended for human consumption, but it does not include fixed public or private water supply equipment.

A plasticiser is a substance which when added to a material, usually a plastic, makes it flexible, resilient and easier to handle. Early examples of plasticisers include water to soften clay and oils to plasticise pitch for waterproofing ancient boats. Today, modern plasticisers are manmade organic chemicals; the majority of which are esters, such as adipates and phthalates.

Importantly, they are not just additives (like pigments or fillers). They are major components that determine the physical properties of polymer products. They are colourless, odourless liquids produced by a simple chemical reaction, whereby molecules of water are eliminated from commercially produced petrochemical products.

In the EU there is specific legislation in place to ensure that food contact materials are safe and that their components do not 'migrate' (transfer) into foodstuffs in unacceptable quantities. There are two types of migration limits that have been established in the area of plastic materials:

• an overall migration limit (OML) of 60 mg (of substances)/kg (of foodstuff or food simulants) that applies to all substances that can migrate from the food contact material to the foodstuff and
• a specific migration limit (SML) which applies to individual authorised substances and is fixed on the basis of the toxicological evaluation of the substance. The SML is generally established according to the acceptable daily intake (ADI) or the tolerable daily intake (TDI) set by the Scientific Committee on Food (SCF). To set the limit, it is assumed that, every day throughout his/her lifetime, a person of 60 kg eats 1 kg of food packed in plastics containing the relevant substance at the maximum permitted quantity.