THE USE OF OVERALL MIGRATION METHODOLOGY TO TEST FOR FOOD CONTACT SUBSTANCES WITH SPECIFIC MIGRATION LIMITS

Laurence Castle (1) , Emma Bradley (2) , Sue Jickells (3) , Wendy Read (2) , Katrina Mountfort (3)

1 CSL - DEFRA Central Science Laboratory
2 Food Safety & Quality
3 Forensic Science & Drug Monitoring

This work investigated if overall migration (OM) test procedures could be used to test also for the migration of specific substances from plastics. The OM test procedure used was the evaporative gravimetric method used with volatile food simulants. Thirty (30) food contact substances (additives and monomers) were tested for their chemical stability and volatile loss during the heated evaporation stage of the OM procedure. 18 of the 30 were determined in acceptable yield. It is concluded that in the list of ca. 620 EU substances that have specific migration limit values of 5 mg/kg or higher, and based on considerations of stability and volatility, more than half could be amenable to control using OM methodology. This is particularly the case for inert plastics with low intrinsic overall migration values of oligomers. This means that, based on the OM test result found, testing laboratories could decide case-by-case if known additives and starting substances are covered by the OM result and no separate testing would be required for specific migration, with time and resource cost savings.

Mots clés: Life Sciences

Laurence Castle, Emma Bradley, Sue Jickells, Wendy Read, Katrina Mountfort. THE USE OF OVERALL MIGRATION METHODOLOGY TO TEST FOR FOOD CONTACT SUBSTANCES WITH SPECIFIC MIGRATION LIMITS. Food Additives and Contaminants, 2009, 26 (04), pp.574-582. ⟨10.1080/02652030802477947⟩. ⟨hal-00577339⟩