Post-consumer poly(ethylene terephthalate) for direct food contact applications - Final proof of food law compliance

Modern environmental packaging requirements increasingly raise the question of recyclability of used packaging plastics into new food packaging applic ations. Due to its highly advantageous material properties, poly(ethylene t erephthalate) (PET) is one of the candidate plastics, for instance for the bottle-to-bottle recycling for packaging of soft drinks or other products. In order to demonstrate the necessary cleansing efficiency of a commercial recycling process for PET and the legal conformity of the recycled PET prod uct from this process a full challenge test study inclusively migration tes ting on the final food contact article was carried out and the obtained res ults are described. The work presented here was part of a petition dossier filed to the US Food and Drug Administration (FDA) in order to request the agency's official food regulatory opinion of the studied PET recycling proc ess. Taking the US FDA's consumption factor of 0.05 for PET into account, a ll measured migration values were found below of any food regulatory concer n. This not only for the aqueous food simulating liquids but also for 95% e thanol which can be considered to be the most severe fat simulant out of th e currently considered alternative fatty food simulants. consequently, the agency confirmed the suitability of the recycled PET material for all types of foodstuffs with a limitation to the use in applications at room tempera ture and below. Therefore the quality of the recycled PET manufactured by t he process can also be considered to suitable for packaging fatty foodstuff such as edible oils themselves under room temperature contact conditions.