Risk assessment of migration from packaging materials into foodstuffs
Résumé
This work proposes a generic quantitative methodology to assess the risk of the migration of chemicals from packaging materials into foodstuffs. The distribution of the concentration in food is derived from a stochastic resolution of dimensionless transport equations accounting,for physical properties of the considered food product(s) (solid/ liquid, volume), of the packaging material(s) (polymer type, thickness), and of possible migrants (initial concentration, diffusion and partition coefficients at the temperature of storage). Each parameter is decomposed as a product of a scale factor and a dimensionless random contribution with known distributions (normal, log-normal, Weibull, gamma, and beta). Nonlinear dependencies between all parameters (up to 12) are reliably handled based on projection techniques and convolution products. The proposed methodology is illustrated on three arbitrary classes of packed food products combined with two migration scenarios and three typical boundary conditions (solid food, liquid food, no-external transport resistance). Finally, data analysis abacuses are provided to appraise the migration risk for more general cases.