Benchmarking the in Vitro Toxicity and Chemical Composition of Plastic Consumer Products

Abstract

Plastics are known sources of chemical exposure and few, prominent plastic-associated chemicals, such as bisphenol A and phthalates, have been thoroughly studied. However, a comprehensive characterization of the complex chemical mixtures present in plastics is missing. In this study, we benchmark plastic consumer products, covering eight major polymer types, according to their toxicological and chemical signatures using in vitro bioassays and nontarget high-resolution mass spectrometry. Most (74%) of the 34 plastic extracts contained chemicals triggering at least one end point, including baseline toxicity (62%), oxidative stress (41%), cytotoxicity (32%), estrogenicity (12%), and antiandrogenicity (27%). In total, we detected 1411 features, tentatively identified 260, including monomers, additives, and nonintentionally added substances, and prioritized 27 chemicals. Extracts of polyvinyl chloride (PVC) and polyurethane (PUR) induced the highest toxicity, whereas polyethylene terephthalate (PET) and high-density polyethylene (HDPE) caused no or low toxicity. High baseline toxicity was detected in all “bioplastics” made of polylactic acid (PLA). The toxicities of low-density polyethylene (LDPE), polystyrene (PS), and polypropylene (PP) varied. Our study demonstrates that consumer plastics contain compounds that are toxic in vitro but remain largely unidentified. Since the risk of unknown compounds cannot be assessed, this poses a challenge to manufacturers, public health authorities, and researchers alike. However, we also demonstrate that products not inducing toxicity are already on the market.

Impacts of food contact chemicals on human health: a consensus statement

“…from additives [86]. More and more NIAS, including those with evidence for migration, have been detected by modern analytical methods, but many remain unidentified due to prevailing limitations in structure elucidation [27,55,74,[87][88][89][90][91][92][93][94][95]. However, it is well known that for several types of food contact materials, migration of NIAS is more significant than migration of intentionally used substances [3,96].…”

“…Approximately 12,000 intentionally added substances [67] and 30,000 to 100,000 non-intentionally added substances potentially migrate into food from various food contact articles [112]. Appropriate chemical-analytical methods are lacking for most of them [27,90,95,113,114], which makes it currently impossible to discern the contribution of these chemicals to the overall human exposure to xenobiotics. However, food packaging is estimated to be the most relevant source of human exposure to plasticizers [71,115].…”

Potential endocrine disrupting properties of toys for babies and infants

“…Antiandrogenic effects of toys and babyproducts could also be detected by Szczepańska et al [13] using the Yeast Androgen screen. Using comparable approaches, endocrine activity was reported for several plastic food contact materials ( [4,[14][15][16][17], canine plastic toys [18] and water from plastic bottles [8].…”

“…Children are exposed in their daily life to multiple chemical compounds, via food, dust, personal care products and other consumer products [3,4]. Several studies based on observations on the mouthing behavior of children from 0 to 36 months confirm that children put a great diversity of objects into their mouths, including toys [1].…”

“…. .. As some of these constituents are not covalently bound to the polymers, plastics have been shown to release chemicals such as phthalates or UV filters that are known endocrine disrupters [4].…”