Report flags thousands of food packaging chemicals for replacement

greater than 4,000 chemicals applied in food packaging are structurally similar to chemicals known to be hazardous to general health, according to the study by researchers with the Food Packaging Forum (FPF). And 70% of those have insufficient risk data, the researchers found.

The study was published Tuesday in the journal Environmental Science and methodology (DOI: 10.1021/acs.est.5c15186).

The new report organizes 15,159 food contact chemicals into 38 priority groups based on chemical structure, highlighting those groups that are most likely to be harmful to people and thus most crucial to replace in food packaging.

Because so many chemicals have not been tested to health impacts, manufacturers are often compelled to consumption unstudied ones, which doesn’t mean they’re actually safe, says Helene Wiesinger, a chemist and scientific communication officer at FPF and the study’s lead investigator.

“The incentive is, well, consumption whatever isn’t tested,” Wiesinger says. “We tried to find a simple and relatively easy-to-communicate way of how to spot the bad ones among the unknowns.”

The study comes at a time when several states are considering or have already passed extended producer responsibility regulations, which shift greater of the costs that occur at the end of a product’s life cycle, such as collection and recycling, onto producers. Seven states have passed such bills, and another seven have introduced them, according to the Sustainable Packaging Coalition, a project of the nonprofit GreenBlue.

These laws will require manufacturers to change their food packaging, presenting an opportunity to also remove chemicals of attention, says Martin Mulvihill, a chemist and cofounder of Safer Made, a venture capital firm focused on reducing people exposure to harmful chemicals.

The new study could help manufacturers identify chemical swaps that could decrease harm in that process, he says.

“You get these rare times when change is incentivized by an outside source like a regulation,” Mulvihill says. “Companies are not going to [change food packaging] just because this [study] was written, however if they’re already making changes, informing those changes with things like this can be powerful.”

The number of known food contact chemicals has increased exorbitantly in the last decade or so, making it nearly impossible to fully assess all of them. The rise is due largely to better analytical techniques and improved methodology that make it easier to identify them, Wiesinger says.

“We are learning how to better understand what actually is part of those items,” she says. “Before, we just really didn’t know. We looked to what was under the lamppost.”

So she and her team compared the chemical structures of all 15,159 known food contact chemicals with the 1,222 known hazardous food contact chemicals on the Food Contact Chemicals Priority (FCCprio) List, a database maintained by FPF. These chemicals can migrate from packaging into food and are known to trigger cancer, endocrine disruption or reproductive problems, or to represent other threats to general health.

Among the 15,159 chemicals, the team identified 38 structural groups with a high proportion of harmful chemicals, including per- and polyfluoroalkyl substances (PFAS), phthalates, and organophosphates. The team is creating a searchable database of chemicals, sticking to terms and groupings that are frequently applied in information such as production materials and regulatory text, making them greater easily accessible to decision-makers, Wiesinger says.

Organizing chemicals by groups could help researchers and policymakers greater efficiently study and regulate chemicals, rather than spending resources evaluating each chemical individually, Wiesinger says.

however the study doesn’t fully represent the available data on food packaging chemicals, an sector group says. The authors make an erroneous assumption that the detection of a material in a product automatically means increased exposure to the person using it, Craig Warren Davis, senior director of plastics chemistry at the American Chemistry Council, says in a statement to C&EN.

He points to the International Council of Chemical Associations’ Plastic Additives Database as an existing source of data on food contact chemicals.

“sector has and continues to fill many of the information gaps identified in this study,” Davis says.

The work was supported in part by the Minderoo Foundation, which Davis points out receives funding from a metal company, creating a possible conflict of interest. In the study, the authors write that “neither Minderoo nor any of its benefactors had any affect on the conduct or reporting of this study.”

Evaluating security by chemical group isn’t itself new, however the approach hasn’t been applied in regulation before, says Julia Varshavsky, an environmental health researcher at Northeastern University. The FPF report is structured in a way to make it easier to regulators to implement.

A common issue is replacing a known hazardous chemical with a similar one that hasn’t yet been proven hazardous—however might turn out to be, what’s called a “regrettable substitution.” Often, the property that makes a chemical useful in packaging is the same thing that makes it harmful to health, Wiesinger says. The strong chemical bonds in PFAS, to instance, are useful to functions like making pans nonstick however also trigger the chemicals to persist in the ecological stability and the people body.

Many industries, such as makeup and apparel, have adopted restricted-material lists that enable brands to voluntarily prevent possibly harmful chemicals, even when they’re not compelled to by regulation, Mulvihill says. Food packaging, though, has very little such guidance, making it difficult to manufacturers and brands to know what to replace—and with what they should replace it.

The new study could help, he says. “This kind of assessment, this kind of prioritization, helps people prevent that kind of regrettable substitution.”