A new study identifies the chemical groups that packaging manufacturers and regulators should target for replacement in the food system to protect human health.
More than 4,000 chemicals used in food packaging are structurally similar to chemicals known to be hazardous to human health, according to the study by researchers with the Food Packaging Forum (FPF). And 70% of those have insufficient hazard data, the researchers found.
The study was published Tuesday in the journal Environmental Science and Technology (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 important to replace in food packaging.
Because so many chemicals have not been tested for health effects, manufacturers are often compelled to use 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, use 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 more 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 concern, says Martin Mulvihill, a chemist and cofounder of Safer Made, a venture capital firm focused on reducing human exposure to harmful chemicals.
The new study could help manufacturers identify chemical swaps that could reduce 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, but if they’re already making changes, informing those changes with things like this can be powerful.”
Avoiding regrettable substitutions in food packaging
The number of known food contact chemicals has increased exorbitantly in the last decade or so, making it nearly impossible to fully evaluate all of them. The rise is due largely to better analytical techniques and improved technology that make it easier to identify them, Wiesinger says.
“We are learning how to better understand what actually is part of those products,” she says. “Before, we just really didn’t know. We looked for 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 cause cancer, endocrine disruption or reproductive problems, or to represent other threats to human 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 commonly used in information such as production materials and regulatory text, making them more easily accessible to decision-makers, Wiesinger says.
Organizing chemicals by groups could help researchers and policymakers more efficiently study and regulate chemicals, rather than spending resources evaluating each chemical individually, Wiesinger says.
But the study doesn’t fully represent the available data on food packaging chemicals, an industry group says. The authors make an erroneous assumption that the detection of a substance 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.
“Industry 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 potential conflict of interest. In the study, the authors write that “neither Minderoo nor any of its benefactors had any influence on the conduct or reporting of this study.”
Evaluating safety by chemical group isn’t itself new, but the approach hasn’t been used 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 for regulators to adopt.
A common problem is replacing a known hazardous chemical with a similar one that hasn’t yet been proven hazardous—but may 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, for example, are useful for functions like making pans nonstick but also cause the chemicals to persist in the environment and the human body.
Many industries, such as cosmetics and apparel, have adopted restricted-substance lists that enable brands to voluntarily avoid potentially harmful chemicals, even when they’re not compelled to by regulation, Mulvihill says. Food packaging, though, has very little such guidance, making it difficult for 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 avoid that kind of regrettable substitution.”
