David Burrows writes about the potential impact of chemicals in plastic packaging on our health
Plastic pollution of the oceans is considered to be an environmental disaster, but is there a food scare lurking beneath the waves too? This question was posed in an article for The Food Chain in May 2019. Evidence of a problem was snowballing, with both plastic, and the chemicals used in its production, attracting the attention of more academics and campaigners. However, this wasn’t really an issue that had yet cut through to the public psyche.
Fast-forward four and a half years and the trickle of research, reports and articles has become a flood. From the microplastics reportedly infiltrating our brains to the chemicals released from milk bottles for babies, hardly a week goes by without a study showing the impacts of our (still) growing use of plastic packaging.
“Plastics are incredibly useful [including for preserving foodstuff]. I don’t want there to be any doubt about that,” explained Jane Muncke, Managing Director at the Food Packaging Forum (FPF), in an interview on The Great Simplification podcast earlier this year. “The problem with the material is that it’s not inert. So that means chemically it can interact with the environment it comes in contact with or with the foodstuff in the case of food packaging – and we call that migration.”
In other words, chemicals can transfer into the food or drink. Muncke and her team of scientists at the Zurich-based non-profit have been at the forefront of unpicking this topic to raise awareness and feed in to both European and global regulations. Their latest work, published in September together with experts from four academic institutions, compared over 14,000 known food contact chemicals (FCCs) with data from five human biomonitoring programmes, three metabolome/ exposome databases, and the scientific literature.
“Certain groups of chemicals have been widely detected in human samples and in FCMs [food contact materials], such as bisphenols, PFAS, phthalates, metals, and volatile organic compounds,” the Forum noted. “Many of these chemicals have hazard properties of concern and have been linked to harming human health. However, for other chemicals that transfer from the packaging into the food, such as synthetic antioxidants and oligomers, little is known about their presence and fate in humans.”
Their findings, published in the peer-reviewed Journal of Exposure Science and Environmental Epidemiology and garnering widespread media coverage, revealed evidence of 3,601 FCCs present in humans, representing 25% of the known FCCs. The team also showed which chemicals used in food packaging and other food contact articles have been found in human samples, such as urine, blood, and breast milk.
Responding to the research, the Brussels-based non-profit Safe Food Advocacy Europe (Safe) noted that: “194 of these substances [food contact chemicals] are routinely tested for in humans, because they are potentially damaging above certain levels. Most worryingly, 80 of these substances have hazard properties of high concern.”
What fascinates Muncke, and has done so for the past 16 years, is the fact that “even the people who manufacture plastics don’t know the chemical composition of the finished material, and so we are putting this material in contact with food, we know that its chemical constituents can transfer from packaging into food, but we don’t know exactly what those chemicals are.”
Plastic food packaging is certainly a big area of focus. However, there is a growing realisation that it represents only part of the problem. Chemicals are used in other packaging materials too: “The food we eat travels and is sold wrapped in over 14,400 non-edible chemical substances, present in bottles, cans, plastic foil, paper, and any other packaging,” according to Safe.
Bitter sweets
PFAS, the so-called forever chemicals that have been the subject of movies and documentaries, have emerged as a key issue for food companies who swap their single-use plastic for paper alternatives. “Manufacturers are working to ensure sufficient product protection and effective wrapping techniques to produce a robust, appealing and sustainable solution,” noted ConfectioneryNews in October. “Yet one concern remains: the presence of chemicals.”
The companies that produce sweets and chocolate bars, in particular, have spent millions designing paper packaging that can offer the same flexibility as plastic wrappers (which remain difficult to recycle). But in their attempt to address one problem – plastic – they have encountered another: chemicals. “Per- and polyfluoroalkyl substances (PFAS) […] pose an ongoing risk to consumers,” warned the ConfectioneryNews article. “PFAS are hazardous chemicals often found in food packaging, such as sweet wrappers and popcorn bags. They can travel from food contact materials onto the food we eat and into our bodies.”
The tone of the article is significant: this is not a tabloid newspaper seeking clicks, but a reputable business title read by those with influence in the global food sector. Indeed, what might have been sidelined at the outset is now very much grounded in science – and increasing amounts of it.
“Food packaging comes in different shapes, sizes, and colours to ensure that our food remains fresh and safe, but many people are unaware that it can also be harmful because it may contain toxic chemicals that seep into our food and, eventually, enter our bodies,” wrote Dorota Napierska, toxic-free circular economy policy officer at Zero Waste Europe (ZWE) in a blog for the waste management title Circular Online last year. “Although these chemicals are not detectable through our senses, they can be measured in our blood or urine, and scientists warn that they can cause long-term health problems.”
Napierska is one of many campaigners that have been pressing for tighter EU rules on food packaging. Basic food contact legislation is 45 years old, Napierska told The Food Chain in 2022 and “has never been systematically evaluated”. She and others want legislation to be reshaped in line with a key principle of the Chemicals Strategy for Sustainability: to eliminate hazardous chemicals from products. “It’s time to ensure proper protection from our real-life exposure to a large number of different chemicals,” Napierska insisted.
Recently ZWE and other European non-governmental organisations (NGOs) called on the European Commission to ban PVC (polyvinyl chloride), the plastic they say that, “has the potential to contain a high volume of additives and the largest number of substances of concern out of all the plastic types”. PVC and additives, they noted, featured in the Restriction Roadmap – an EU list of the most harmful chemicals that will likely need restriction – yet no action has been taken.
Damage limitation?
Restricting chemicals at EU level can be a slow process – even when the evidence is stacked against certain substances, including those still being used in food packaging. Bisphenol A is due to be banned from FCMs in the EU at the end of this year. The ban, based on a scientific assessment from the European Food Safety Authority that concluded that Bisphenol A has potential harmful effects on the immune system, will apply mainly to the use of the chemical in packaging, such as the coating used on metal cans. However, it will also apply to its use in, for example, reusable plastic drinks bottles and water distribution coolers.
Indeed, it’s worth noting that the problem with packaging and chemicals is not exclusive to single-use items. Several studies have highlighted the benefits of reuse over single use in terms of environmental impacts but, “very little literature exists investigating the effects that repeated contamination and washing can have on the material’s intrinsic properties”, noted academics, including those from the Technological University of the Shannon in Ireland, in a November paper for the journal Current Research in Green and Sustainable Chemistry.
The Food Packaging Forum references a previous study that detected 509 chemicals in plastic FCMs made for reuse while 853 chemicals were identified in recycled PET alone. Companies that have been running trials on reusable packaging, for example in supermarkets or coffee shops, are beginning to dig deeper into the containers and cups they use in terms of environmental impact and hygiene. Whether they consider food safety and chemical migration is moot.
The Forum’s tips for reuse explain how, “all plastics are complex materials containing many different chemicals that can transfer from the packaging into the food they carry, contact, or cook. However, this process of chemical migration into food is dependent on the type of plastic, contact time, temperature, food type, and the contact area between the plastic container and the food. Therefore, whether your plastic container is safe to reuse depends on what it was designed for and how you are using it.”
Did you know for example that the warmer the food and the package, the more chemicals are likely to migrate from the container into food? Or that many chemicals migrate at higher levels in fatty and/or acidic foods than in aqueous foods?
European NGOs have been running campaigns to help educate everyone on all this, but it is complicated and confusing. A review of citizens’ level of understanding of FCMs and the risks they represent showed that “most current labels about food contact materials are ill-understood; participants recognised them, but they did not understand their meaning”. There is “ample room” for improvement, the review concluded.
The current EU food contact materials regulation is in need of updating. A revision of the EU legislation on FCMs was announced in May 2020, and a subsequent review highlighted a number of deficiencies in the current law, including poor quality, availability and transparency of information in the supply chain and a serious lack of enforcement rules across Europe. In light of this and as part of the Farm to Fork Strategy, the Commission has planned to revise EU FCM rules. As consultants at EY noted in a March presentation, “the ultimate aim is to establish a robust regulatory system for FCMs that fosters food safety, public health protection, market effectiveness, and sustainability”.
There have already been delays and more are expected. “Long-delayed overhaul of food contact material rules [are] still far off,” reported Ends Europe recently. A ‘sustainability study’ on revising the regulation should be ready by February next year, for example, as the Commission complained of a “high workload on implementation”. A presentation by the working group on FCMs within DG Sante noted that FCM design “generally undershoots on sustainability” and that FCMs “meet current needs but they undermine future generations’ ability to satisfy theirs”.
Indeed, plastics alone undermine all planetary boundaries. November and December are being billed as a tipping point, however, but which way we tip depends on the outcome of the final talks to agree a global plastics treaty. The Scientists’ Coalition for an effective plastics treaty is among those who want chemicals to be addressed within the agreement. In a briefing paper they warn that our food can be “contaminated via environmental pollution and the plastics used to produce, process, package and prepare them, including recycled and reusable plastics”, while “widespread environmental pollution further contributes to acute, chronic, and transboundary human exposures to plastic chemicals”.
Jane Muncke at the FPF is among those involved in the voluntary coalition. She has a stark warning. “There are progressive rules to a certain extent [for food contact materials], but they are not being enforced. So, I don’t feel that European citizens are better protected from these chemicals than people elsewhere in the world, to be honest.”
