How to Guarantee the Safety of Recycled Polyolefins for Food Contact

Packaging materials, among them plastics, are now the focus of the circular economy. The recent legislation establishes the elimination of single use plastics and the use of a high percentage of recycled materials in the packaging, even in those used for food applications. Among the postconsumer plastics, PET has been taken as the primary objective for recycling and nowadays the recycling technologies for PET are well advanced, thus producing very high quality of rPET. However, the case of polyolefins is very different. In a recent study carried out in our lab, more than 450 substances were identified in rHDPE and many of them were above the acceptable limits for food contact. It is quite obvious that the use of recycled polyolefins is not ready yet.

The first principle is to guarantee the safety in use. But for this purpose, advanced analytical techniques are required, as the forest of peaks/substances released from the recycled polyolefins is still a nightmare. Usually, when analyzing the leachables/migration the problem is not to detect them, but to identify the individual substances and confirm their identity versus the corresponding standards. Unfortunately, many of the released chemicals don’t have standards available and thus, the confirmation and later quantification is not possible. New advanced techniques, such as ion mobility (IMS) in high resolution mass spectrometry and the use of libraries provide new tools for this purpose.

The presentation will show details of analytical methodology used, a few case studies and the available libraries containing more than 10,000 substances detected worldwide from packaging materials with the IMS data.

Presenter: Cristina Nerin (Professor, Department of Analytical Chemistry, University of Zaragoza)

Full Professor at the University of Zaragoza (Spain), PhD in Analytical Chemistry, Master in Science (Analytical Chemistry) and Degree in Chemistry at the University of Zaragoza (Spain). Director of the Research Group GUIA at the University of Zaragoza and Director of the Master in Environmental Engineering at the University of Zaragoza from 1990 to 2012. Author of more than 395 Scientific Publications included in the Citation Index, Director of 38 PhD Thesis (5 more are in process). Principal Investigator of more than 240 Research Projects in both Competitive calls and also R&D&I with Industry Inventor in six International Patents dealing with active packaging and in one International Patent on Intelligent Packaging. All of them are in exploitation (market). Six Research Awards received. Participant in more than 140 International Conferences and Professor of several International Courses n Europe, Asia and South-America.