Fresenius conference: Residues of Food Contact Materials in Food

Food contact materials include production machines to packaging materials and kitchen appliances, and they can be a source of food contamination. To ensure sufficient protection for the consumers, the legislator adopted the regulation of certain materials. Current legal measures in this area and other topics related to food contact materials were presented from 20 to 21 November 2013 at the third International Fresenius Conference "Residues of Food Contact Materials in Food" in Cologne (Germany).

Printing inks, mineral oils

Within the scope of the conference, a representative of the German Federal Ministry of Food, Agriculture and Consumer Protection (BMELV) informed about currently ongoing legal measures regarding printing inks for FCMs and the protection of food from migrating mineral oil components. The draft of the "Printing Inks Ordinance" contains arrangements for both printing inks for indirect (e.g. package imprints) and direct food contact (e.g. napkins). The draft of the "Ordinance on Mineral Oil" on the other hand is supposed to assure that there is no migration of mineral oil aromatic hydrocarbons (MOAH) from FCMs made of recycling paper into foodstuff.

Inadequate securing of FCM-migrants

At the conference, Konrad Grob from KLZH/Zurich, Switzerland, demanded an open discussion regarding a fundamental problem. Normally, the proof of the sanitary harmlessness of a packaging material lags far behind the legal requirements. All stakeholders (the industry, the regulatory authorities, the legislator) have known this for years but the situation is blocked. Since the implementation of the mandatory compliance declarations, the situation became even more difficult, because compliance with the legally claimed securing which is rarely factual has to be guaranteed. Whilst the industry has no interest in uncovering problems, the regulatory authorities are not able to enforce high security standards due to the fact that they needed to take too many products from the market under the given circumstances. Finally, the legislator lacks of concepts how to proceed concretely when compliance is questionable (in particular substances which emerge during the production process of Food Contact Materials represent a serious problem). It was often difficult to meet the legal demands and in some cases compliance could only be accomplished incompletely because of insufficient methods, Mr Grob said. Nevertheless, this circumstance should not lead to manageable work remaining undone, the expert continued. Therefore, more flexible rules were needed. He suggested to make the reality more tolerable by using work plans, provided that there were no direct health risks detectable. Producers should reveal gaps in their compliance work and should develop work plans how to close them with the available methods. These plans had then to be discussed with a competent authority which had to approve of them. The authority should also examine the work progress, he said. Approved work plans could be integrated in the compliance declarations, filling the gaps concerning the securing of harmlessness, he stated. Such an approach would offer the needed flexibility to maNIKE SB