Christian Kirchnawy

OFI - Austrian Research Institute, Austria

Title: Identification of Risk Factors for the safety of recycled plastic in contact-sensitive packaging, and strategies to avoid critical DNA-reactive contaminants in recycled plastic

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Biography

Christian Kirchnawy studied food and biotechnology in Vienna. Since his diploma thesis in 2010 he is working on the safety assessment of food packaging by a combination of in-vitro bioassays and chemical analysis. For his PhD thesis in technical chemistry he developed test methods for the detection of endocrine active substances. Since 2011 he is working as a team leader at OFI. The main focus of his work, is on the safety assessment of food contact materials and medical devices.

Abstract

The European Union has ambitious goals for the recycling of plastic, in 2030 all recycled plastic packaging must contain recycling content. A major hurdle on the way to a circular economy for food packaging are safety concerns. DNA-reactive mutagens have 120-fold lower thresholds in the safety evaluation process of the European Food Safety Authority EFSA than any other substance group, and worst-case assumptions on contaminations with DNA-reactive mutagens are currently defining the minimum decontamination efficiency of recycling processes. In the research project SafeCycle, researchers from OFI, FH Campus Vienna and Fraunhofer IVV worked on the identification of risk factors that can lead to DNA-reactive, mutagenic contaminants and on strategies how these components can be avoided. For recycled PET bottles, that are already authorized for food contact, no indications for mutagenic contaminants could be found. However, results for some recycled polyethylene and polypropylene plastic showed alarmingly high mutagenic activity. Thermal degradation products from some color or printing components (azo pigments, nitrocellulose binder) were identified as a critical risk factors. De-Inking, Sorting of uncolored fractions and De-Labelling were shown to be very promising strategies to avoid these critical mutagenic contaminants and enable a safe circular recycling of printed food packaging in the future.