Report of an inter-laboratory comparison from the European Reference Laboratory for Food Contact Materials: ILC003 2013 – Food Contact Surface Area of Kitchen Utensils
This report presents the results of the ILC which focused on the determination of the food contact surface area of kitchen utensils.
The general aim of the exercise was to assess the capability of official control laboratories to measure the food contact surface area of kitchen utensils and to compare the most commonly used approaches for the determination of the surface area in terms of reproducibility and trueness.
the ILC01 2012 highlighted several issues in the determination of the surface area of kitchen utensils. The results for the food contact surface area of a melamine spoon sample ranged from 0.73-1.99 dm2. Iin order to figure out whether the approaches that were used for the determination of the surface area were unsuitable or the performance of the laboratories was unacceptable.
The test materials were five different types of plastic kitchen utensils obtained from a global supplier. Homogeneity studies on width, depth, length and thickness of the samples were carried out by the EURL-FCM. They indicated sufficient sample homogeneity.
Samples were dispatched to 67 participants (30 NRLs + 37 national official control laboratories from Belgium, Germany, Italy, Spain and the United Kingdom), 63 of them submitted results for the surface area and 53 for the envelope volume.
Results showed a satisfactory laboratory performance.Difficulties were observed for the determination of the sample height that will be foreseeably in food contact (Hf). They would not affect migration results if the migration is constant over the entire sample surface, i.e. unless the tested articles are multi-material products or have a printing on the handle. For the determination of the surface area, the trueness and precision of the methods depended on the sample shape. With respect to the final migration result, the obtained reproducibility standard deviations for all four approaches were acceptable considering that the migration measurement itself can be affected by uncertainties of similar levels as those of the determination of the surface area.
MIETH Anja;
HOEKSTRA Eddo;
2014-01-22
Publications Office of the European Union
JRC87418
978-92-79-35278-2,
1831-9424,
EUR 26477,
OP LB-NA-26477-EN-N,
http://publications.jrc.ec.europa.eu/repository/handle/JRC87418,
10.2788/65099,
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