Thousands of chemicals used in food packaging lack comprehensive safety data, raising concerns about potential health risks, according to new research.
Out of approximately 15,000 chemicals utilized in food-contact materials, only 1,222 have identified major health risks, the study published in Environmental Science and Technology reports. The safety and toxicity of the vast majority remain largely unknown. "There's 350,000 chemicals that are put on global markets, and for a lot of those, we have relatively little information about their toxicity," said Olwenn Martin, an associate professor in health and environment at University College London, who was not involved in the research. "They've not been exhaustively tested."
Helene Weisinger, a chemist at the Swiss nonprofit Food Packaging Forum and lead author of the paper, noted that regulatory efforts often focus on one chemical at a time, leading to replacements that may carry similar risks. For instance, bisphenol A (BPA), a known endocrine disruptor, has been phased out of many food-contact applications in the U.S. and banned in the EU for such uses by 2025. However, its common replacement, BPS, has shown similar health concerns.
"It’s chemical whack-a-mole," Weisinger stated, referring to the practice of banning one substance only for another with similar properties to take its place.
To address this issue, Weisinger and her colleagues have developed a new system that groups chemically similar substances together. This approach aims to simplify the regulatory process by allowing for the assessment and potential regulation of entire groups of chemicals rather than individual compounds. The researchers identified 38 groups where many members exhibited clear health risks, with numerous compounds within each group still lacking sufficient toxicological data.
"The backlog is such that it would take hundreds, if not thousands, of years to test all of these chemicals at current rates, and even regulatory bodies are looking at different ways of doing this," Martin explained. "One of the ways is by grouping chemicals: looking at chemicals that are fairly similar—structurally or through other means—to be able to make assumptions about chemicals in this group and regulate them as a group."
Martin Wagner, a biologist at the Norwegian University of Science and Technology who studies the health effects of plastics, noted that stricter regulations in Europe have led to a decrease in exposure to regulated substances like BPA and phthalates. However, he also observed an increase in exposure to alternative chemicals, highlighting the challenge of substitution.
"We're seeing in European populations that levels of exposure to phthalates and to regulated bisphenols, BPA and so on, are dropping, which is a good thing," Wagner said. "But at the same time, we see that the level of exposure in Europeans to all these alternative chemicals is increasing."
Wagner also pointed out that food packaging materials are often complex mixtures containing unintentionally added substances, or NIAS, which can leach into food and water. "We have no way of making sure that all these compounds are safe. Yet we know that these are leaching into food, into water. So people are very likely to be exposed to that complex mixture of compounds with very little oversight."
Regulating chemicals in groups could help mitigate this problem by providing a more efficient and comprehensive approach to ensuring the safety of food packaging materials.