Food packaging has made mainstream news headlines this past week — and not in a good way.
Newly published research indicated that thousands of chemicals found in food packaging are showing up in human bodies, and that close to 200 food-contact materials are being marketed with potentially breast cancer-causing chemicals.
One set of research, led in part by the Zurich-based nonprofit Food Packaging Forum Foundation, found evidence in humans of more than 3,600 known food-contact chemicals, or one-quarter of known FCCs, 80 of which have “hazard properties of high concern.” PFAS, phthalates and other classes of chemicals are among the FCCs in food-contact materials included in human biomonitoring programs.
Megan Liu, science and policy manager at Toxic-Free Future, said that the new research underscores an ongoing need to change regulation.
“It implies that when toxic chemicals are allowed to be used in our products, those chemicals will only continue to show up in our bodies,” Liu said. “It just continues to show how urgent the need is to pass regulations that are really strong in banning the most harmful chemicals and materials ... Once we ban harmful chemicals, it'll help drive the marketplace towards using safer items.”
Researchers acknowledged there have been limitations with regulations.
“The challenges in regulating [food-contact materials] and managing the health risks associated with [food-contact chemicals] are diverse and legislation often does not keep up with the latest scientific understanding,” researchers wrote in the Journal of Exposure Science & Environmental Epidemiology.
In the U.S., food-contact chemicals are regulated by the Food and Drug Administration, which held a meeting this week about enhancing its process for postmarket assessment of certain chemicals in food, including food-contact substances. Some states have also passed their own laws restricting classes of harmful chemicals in food packaging, including per- and polyfluoroalkyl substances.
Brandon Neuschafer, partner at Arnold & Porter, is working on behalf of clients to try to ensure states enact implementable requirements, as buyers of packaging seek information from suppliers about what’s in their packaging.
“The biggest emerging pattern that I'm seeing is sort of a creep in the number and types of products that are captured by the state laws,” he said during a monthly PFAS briefing webinar focused on food packaging and food contact products held by the Environmental Law Institute this week. He noted that early laws focused on fiber-based packaging and intentionally added PFAS; today, laws cover more applications of PFAS.
“Even though only 13 states have passed laws, in effect that means that we have a national law, because we can't control product flow just into individual states, unless you're a very small producer,” said Neuschafer. “Trying to understand where the consistency is between the laws and the regulations, implementing that into our processes, into our supply chains, working with suppliers and our customers — there's a lot of work that's going on right now on the compliance front.”
Due to supply chain complexity, “unfortunately, some of these changes can take years to implement,” he said. Part of the advocacy process involves “ensuring that there are appropriate alternatives available and ... that those alternatives aren't going to make problems worse.”
The researchers say humans’ actual exposure to FCCs is likely higher than the published research states, as it only reviewed scientific literature for a relatively small subset of chemicals. Concerns for human health range from carcinogenicity to endocrine-disrupting properties. Overall, researchers say these findings improve “the understanding of food contact materials’ contribution to chemical exposure for the human population and highlights opportunities for improving public health.”
Food Packaging Forum researchers were also involved in the breast carcinogen study, published in Frontiers in Toxicology. They compared a list of potential breast carcinogens compiled by the Silent Spring Institute with FPF’s own database on migrating and extractable FCCs. Out of material types studied, the highest number of potentially carcinogenic chemicals were found in plastics, followed by unspecified food-contact materials, paper and board, multimaterials and metals.
Authors concluded that “public health protection can be significantly improved by modernized [food-contact material] regulations with a focus on hazard identification.”
