Objective
Food packaging regulations in Europe require that the packaging materials must n ot cause mass transfer (migration) of harmful substances to the food. Considerab le scientific progress has been made in understanding and modelling the transfer of adventitious hazardous substances from recycled plastics into foodstuffs. Mo st of this knowledge has been elaborated within the recently finished EU project AIR-CT931014. One of the main conclusions of this project was that PET as a low diffusivity plastic and is the most promising polymer for reuse as a food packa ging material. Nevertheless, the practical translation of this progress into inn ovative industrial solutions is still awaited. One of the reasons has typical 'E uropean' character and can be substantiated by the fact that the European legal requirements in this respect are not yet clearly and uniformly defined. As a con sequence, economic and generally recognized test methods are not available so fa r. With respect to PET, there is clearly an obvious reason for the industrial he sitation in launching advanced food packaging applications. In the whole chain o f knowledge on diffusion and migration into and out of PET - which allows for in stance to correlate a known initial concentration in the plastic with the result ing time-dependent concentration in a foodstuff - there remains one missing link : This is the still open but highly important question of the nature and concent ration of actual contaminants found in re-collected PET. Filling up this gap wit h analytical data relevant for the whole of Europe, and then linking this statis tical picture with the available knowledge on PET diffusion behaviour, would ena ble to draw scientifically sound and convincing conclusions about the safety of reusing PET. With respect to recovered paper and board as food packaging materia ls, the situation is practically the reverse of that described for plastics abov e. Considerable work has focussed on the compositional analysis of virgin and re cycled fibres to identify contaminants which could potentially be harmful to the consumer. However, little systematic work has been focused on the interactions of such substances between paper/board fibres and foodstuffs, and taking also po lymeric coatings and plastic layers on paper and board into account. Again, as w ith the PET situation, there is a missing link in the chain of knowledge about t he migration from cellulosic fibres which needs to be made to achieve analogous goals as mentioned above for recycled PET and to enter new pathways in the enorm ous food packaging market of paper and board. This topic gains automatically eve n more importance since it is the clear intention of the European Commission ser vices, now nearing completion of food contact plastics regulations, to bring als o paper and board within the scope of specific European regulations on food cont act materials.
The objectives of the project are
(i) to facilitate indust rial innovation and to harmonise legislative enforcement of new environmental pa ckaging requirements stemming from the Directive 94/62/EEC on packaging and pack aging waste, by
(ii): Drawing up a statistical overview of the nature and exte nt of contaminants in PET recovered from the food packaging market, in order to establish an evaluation platform for the quality and safety-in-use of recycled P ET plastics for food packaging and
(ii) Generating a scientific understanding of the physico-chemical behaviour of chemical contaminants on paper and board fi bres as a basis for safety evaluation and definition of criteria for the appropr iate reuse of recycled fibres for food packaging.
The aim of the project is to overcome the current hesitation and inhibitions to innovation felt by many S ME companies who want to produce new and environmentally-friendly food packaging but who cannot operate in an uncertain legislative framework. Simultaneously pr actical recommendations and guidance to the Commission for appropriate legislati on on recycled materials will be offered.
Fields of science (EuroSciVoc)
CORDIS classifies projects with EuroSciVoc, a multilingual taxonomy of fields of science, through a semi-automatic process based on NLP techniques.
CORDIS classifies projects with EuroSciVoc, a multilingual taxonomy of fields of science, through a semi-automatic process based on NLP techniques.
- natural scienceschemical sciencespolymer sciences
- engineering and technologyother engineering and technologiesfood technologyfood safety
- engineering and technologymaterials engineeringcoating and films
- engineering and technologyother engineering and technologiesfood technologyfood packaging
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Call for proposal
Data not availableFunding Scheme
CSC - Cost-sharing contractsCoordinator
85354 Freising
Germany