Conference Highlights Legal and Analytical Approaches in Food Contact Materials

28 Nov 2013 --- Food Contact Materials are a wide subject: from production machines to packaging materials and kitchen appliances - a contamination of the respective foods can happen anywhere. 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).

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.

At the conference Konrad Grob, KLZH/Zurich, Switzerland, demanded an open discussion regarding a fundamental problem: Normally, the proof of the sanitary harmlessness of a packacking 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. While 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, Grob pointed out. Nevertheless, this circumstance should not lead to manageable work remaining undone, the expert continued. Therefore, more flexible rules were needed. Grob 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, Grob made clear. 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 make compromises, would promote the dialogue between the industry and the authorities and would warrant that manageable work was actually attempted. However, there also had to be the possibility to reject a material if the matching work plans were not sufficient to ensure sanitary harmlessness, Grob closed.