PETpla.net Insider 10 / 2012

MATERIAL / RECYCLING 18 PET planet insider Vol. 13 No. 10/12 www.petpla.net EFSA adopts first opinions on safe PET recycling Food safety f rst The European Food Safety Authority (EFSA) Panel on Food Contact Materials, Enzymes, Flavourings and Processing Aids (CEF) has adopted three scientific opinions on the safety of processes to recycle PET for use in food contact materials. These are the first of a series on recycled plastic materials for food use and cover processes that are considered not to give rise to safety concerns if operated under well-defined and controlled conditions. They cover a total of ten recycling processes, grouped according to the applied recycling technology, and included processes based on Vacurema Prime; Starlinger IV+; and PETUK SSP technologies. EFSA Scientific opinion The scientific criteria used by EFSA’s CEF Panel for evaluating the safety of PET recycling processes was published in a scientific opinion in July 2011. This scientific opinion of EFSA deals with the criteria to be used for safety evaluation of a recy- cling process to produce recycled PET intended to be used for manu- facture of materials and articles in contact with food. The principle of the evaluation is to apply the cleaning efficiency of a recycling technology or process, obtained from a challenge test with surrogate contaminants, to a reference contamination level for post consumer PET, conservatively set a 3mg/kg PET for a contaminant result- ing from possible misuse. The result- ing residual concentration of each contaminant in recycled PET (Cres) is then compared to a modelled concen- tration in PET (Cmod). This Cmod is calculated using generally recognized conservative migration models such that the related migration does not give rise to a die- tary exposure exceeding 0.0025μg/kg bw/day, the human exposure thresh- old value for chemicals with structural alerts raising concern for potential genotoxicity, below which the risk to human health would be negligible. The default scenario, when the recycled PET is intended for general use, is that of an infant weighing 5kg and consum- ing every day 0.75l of water coming from a water bottle manufactured from 100% recycled PET. According to this scenario, it can be derived that the highest concentration of a substance in water that would ensure that the dietary exposure of 0.0025μg/kg bw/ day is not exceeded, is 0.017μg/kg food. Taking into account that generally agreed diffusion modelling overesti- mates migration by at least five times, a calculated migration less than 0.1μg/