Investigation on the migration of contaminants from printed food packaging materials

Description

The safe use of paper and cardboard for food packaging applications is a major area of investigations. Since food packaging materials are mostly printed with inks it is of vital importance to ensure that the ink is not transferred out of the packaging and thereby endangers humans’ health by pollution. Migration is an issue which food packaging material manufactures have to be aware of as several regulations restrict contamination of food unless the substances are approved, harmless or the concentrations are below a set limit of 60 ppm per kilogram of foodstuff. In this presented work a method was developed to test food packaging materials for their migration behavior. Tenax® (also known as modified polyphenylene oxide) is commonly used as food simulant for dry fatty food. The structure of Tenax® permits the adsorption and desorption of volatile substances which makes it suitable for simulation of the migration processes into foodstuff. Commercially available pizza boxes were used for the investigations. In accordance with EU regulations the parameters for this application were set at 2 h and 70°C. The extraction was performed with acetonitrile followed by analysis with GC/MS, Headspace-GC/MS and HPLC/MS. Furthermore, time and temperature dependency of the migration process are investigated since these parameters have a significant impact on the transfer of constituents.

Period	21 Sept 2015
Event title	16 th Austrian Chemistry Days
Event type	Conference
Location	AustriaShow on map