Migrationsuntersuchungen zur Prüfung und Bewertung von Stoffübergängen aus flexiblen Mehrschichtkunststoffverpackungen in Lebensmittel

The EU legislation of monoplastics has made enormous progress and can be considered to be nearly completed. On the other hand, for multi layer plastics, there is not yet a satisfactory regulatory approach available. In principle, there are two options: (i) each plastic layer must comply with current positive lists in EU legislation or (ii) only the food contact layer must comply and act as a barrier against substances from the layers behind. Typically, plastics multi layers exhibit a migration behaviour which is different from mono layer plastics and which is characterized by a delayed migration profile. As a natural consequence, the question needs to be addressed as to whether currently applied migration test conditions are still applicable for multi layers. It appears that migration test conditions should be adapted to the requirements coming from multi layer migration characteristics. Within the frame of a research project fundamental and systematic experimental studies were carried out with the aim to develop a comprehensive testing and evaluation concept for migration from flexible multi layer plastics. In this paper, examples of experimental results obtained in this project are given and the concluded migration testing concept is presented.