Modeling risks of food contamination by packaging

The 2002 Johannesburg World Summit on Sustainable Development highlighted consumer and environmental protection. This priority is also recognized in the proposed REACH (Registration, Evaluation, Authorization and Restriction of Chemicals) directive. This directive will eventually require all new substances to be subject to a "risk management" decision. More restrictive rules are in force for materials in contact with food. They now include a requirement for traceability during the processing and formulation of food-contact materials, including packaging (framework directive 1935/2004/EC). To achieve these objectives, the Directorate-General for Health and Consumer Protection (DG-SANCO, EU), via Regulation 10/2011/EC and its American counterpart, the Food and Drug Administration , encourage the use of modeling to predict the risk of contamination of packaged foods.

This article reviews the methods and modeling techniques that can be used to assess the risk of contamination of foodstuffs by substances in contact packaging: demonstrating conformity, designing safe materials, health monitoring, guiding control policies. To provide tools that can be used by risk managers, the approach is extended to consumer exposure assessment.

Because the proposed approaches are progressively enriched as a function of the results obtained in the previous step, they can be used indiscriminately for :

1) one-off assessment ;

2) interval evaluation ;

3) probabilistic evaluation.

Robust strategies for dealing with sources of uncertainty inherent in scientific knowledge (e.g. lack of knowledge of transport properties within the polymer matrix), in manufacturing or material formulation secrets, and in the final use of the material (contact time, storage temperature, etc.) are also outlined.

The document is organized into five relatively independent sections, with the following objectives:

• physical models of contamination (section