EU-FAIR Project - CT98-4318: "Programme on the Recyclability of Food Packaging Materials with Respect to Food Safety Considerations - Polyethylene Terephthalate (PET), Paper & Board and Plastics Covered by Functional Barriers"

The overall objectives of the project are (i) to generate the scientific/technological basis to enable proposing practical recommendations for appropriate legislation on recycled materials and economic test procedures including predictive tools for the evaluation and safety-optimised design of recycled material-based food packaging applications and (ii) to overcome the current hesitation and inhibitions to innovation felt by many SME companies who want to produce new and environmentally-friendly food packaging but who cannot operate in an uncertain legislative framework. The project consists of 3 sections working on "Criteria for PET recycling", "Usability of recycled paper and board" and "Recycled plastics buried by functional barriers". The project consortium consists of altogether 28 project members from 10 EU member states and one other European country. The partnership is composed by 15 regular project members and 13 voluntary industrial platform partners. In addition, the project is in informal discussion with US-FDA to seek as far as possible for harmonizable conclusions and recommendations. In the first project year one major issue was to select, analyse and experiment with model compounds or so-called surrogates to enable developement of worse case scenarios and mathematical models for the physico-chemical behaviour of recycled packaging material components in direct/indirect contact with food. With the second year the project has entered a comprehensive experimental phase with the intention to make extensive use of the methodological achievements from the first year. During the presentation a short project introduction will be given referring to the existing project brochure and the project Internet homepage http://www.ivv.fhg.de/fair/index.html Project progress will be summarised and the major focus be placed on the paper & board related work. Numerous other conference poster contributions from the project will be addressed where project results are presented more in detail.