NIAS – Stability of Antioxidants

The assessment of the migration of non-intentionally-added-substances (NIAS) from packaging is increasingly becoming the focus of monitoring and also of the requirements of food manufacturers. The EU Commission’s Guide to EU Regulation No. 10/2011 on information flow in the supply chain requires compliance at all stages with NIAS compliance work. At the initiative of industry, a guide to NIAS was also published by ILSI Europe (International Life Sciences Institute, Brussels) in July this year.
According to EU Plastics Regulation 10/2011, substances introduced accidentally must be assessed in accordance with internationally recognized principles of risk assessment (Article 19). Identified substances for which toxicological studies are available can be evaluated on the basis of this data. However, the more common case is that there is a lack of toxicological data or even that a detector signal can not be assigned to any substance in a non-targeted screening analysis.
The following questions should be addressed and further developed:

• What are typical NIAS substances / groups of substances and what NIAS concentrations are in different packaging materials?
• Assessment of modeling, if analytical methods would be sufficiently sensitive to fulfill NIAS migration for unknown substances (10 ppb as criterion or 0.15 μg / person and day)
• Are the theoretical modeling estimates (FACET parameters) realistic or too conservative compared to experimental migration tests?