Chemical Migration from Beverage Packaging Materials—A Review

Abstract

The packaging of a beverage is an essential element for customer convenience and the preservation of beverage quality. On the other hand, chemical compounds present in the packaging materials, either intentionally added or non-intentionally, may be transferred to the food. With a huge variety of materials used in the production, beverage packaging requires safety assessments with respect to the migration of packaging compounds into the filled beverages. The present article deals with potential migrants from different materials for beverage packaging, including PET bottles, glass bottles, metal cans and cardboard multilayers. The list of migrants comprises monomers and additives, oligomers or degradation products. The article presents a review on scientific literature and summarizes European food regulatory requirements. The review shows no evidence of critical substances migrating from packaging into beverages. Testing the migration in real beverages during and at the end of the shelf life shows compliance with the specific migration limits. Accelerated testing using food simulants, however, shows higher migration in some cases, especially at high temperatures in ethanolic simulants. For some migrants, more realistic testing conditions should be applied in order to show compliance with their specific migration limits.

Characterization of VOCs and additives in Italian PET bottles and studies on potential functional aldehydes scavengers

“…The compounds 9-15 (hexanal, octanal, 5-epten-2-one-6, 6-methyl, nonanal, and decanal) observed at higher retention times (from 4 up to 25 min) in the chromatogram of the bottled mineral water stored at 60 °C were not present in that relative to RT stored water. Indeed, high temperature enhances the process of migration of volatile carbonyl compounds (i.e., AA, saturated aldehydes, and ketones) from PET bottles into mineral water, as previously reported [19,25,26,29,31,32,36,37]. At high retention time was also found the presence of ethylene glycol (EG).…”

“…The origin of these compounds has not been clearly recognized and it has been hypothesized that they may come from capsealing resins, PET container, recycled PET, background contamination, water processing steps, VOCs, etc. [19,25,28,29,36,37,40]. Many studies have been carried out to identify the compounds which migrate from the PET bottle to the beverages and, in particular, to the mineral water .…”

Elemental Characterization of Ciders and Other Low-Percentage Alcoholic Beverages Available on the Polish Market

“…Moreover, these results were generated by the same brand and manufacturer. This issue connected with the influence of packaging medium on the release of selected elements into the surrounding environment recently is gaining increasing attention [ 32 , 33 ]. The recent literature reports suggest that there is a clear evidence of the existence of a correlation between the packaging medium and the release of various components, including metallic contaminants.…”

Effect of polyethylene terephthalate incorporated with titanium dioxide and zinc oxide nanoparticles on shelf‐life extension of mayonnaise sauce

“…PET is known to contain small amounts of low‐molecular‐weight oligomers of cyclic compounds ranging from dimer to pentamer (Hoppe et al., 2017). PET is low diffusive polymer, which limits the migration of chemical constituents from PET bottles into foods such as beverages (Schmid & Welle, 2020). Also, in nanocomposites, the migration of nanoparticles is important.…”