Framework for Defining Suitable Recycled Resin Based on Intended End-Use and Characterizing Potential Chemicals of Concern
Changes in consumer behavior and growth in convenience foods, cosmetics, and pharmaceutical products complicates the use of recycled materials by requiring sophisticated and complex multilayer packaging solutions and increasing the amount of packaging waste. Many packaging materials, such as multilayer flexible and rigid plastics, are primarily sent to landfills. This project will develop a common standard that defines grades of PCR plastics with necessary performance properties and regulatory compliance for various uses including food contact applications. This proposal will increase the value of food and non-food grade plastics through identifying standards and grades of recycled plastics by end use. It will also provide a much-needed understanding of performance properties and regulatory compliance of post-consumer plastic markets
Institution: Iowa State University
Principal Investigator: Greg Curtzwiler
Year: 2022
This work was supported by the IAFNS Food Packaging Safety & Sustainability Committee.
Heavy Metals in US Foods: Exposure Assessment by Age Group and Mitigation Strategies
Heavy metals such as arsenic (As), cadmium (Cd), lead (Pb), and mercury (Hg) have the potential to cause neurocognitive impairment to infants and young children who are exposed to them in their diets. These elements can also cause chronic toxicological effects in older children and adults. To help address these risks it is important to identify which foods contain the highest levels of these metals; and based on US consumption of these foods by age group, which food-metal combinations cause the greatest potential exposure via diets. This research will examine which foods contain the highest levels of heavy metals; and based on US consumption of these foods by different age groups, which food-metal dyads cause the greatest human exposures. The researchers will then explore mitigation strategies to reduce these most severe exposures. Feasibility and cost-effectiveness of the strategies must be assessed to provide a realistic picture of what we can achieve in the short term to quickly lower exposures.
Institution: Michigan State University
Principal Investigator: Felicia Wu, PhD.
Date Awarded: May 5, 2022
Read more: Dietary Exposure to Cadmium from Six Common Foods in the United States.
This project is supported by the IAFNS Food and Chemical Safety Committee.
A Framework for Heavy Metal Prioritization and Mitigation for Reducing Metal Intake: Rice and Spinach Case Studies
Rice is a significant source of arsenic and other elemental toxins (e.g. mercury and cadmium) to the human diet, particularly in foods for babies and young children. Spinach is a significant source of the highly toxic metals Cd and Pb as well as other chemicals with negative health implications (e.g., organics, perchlorate), but the processes that lead to levels of concern in spinach differ from those in rice. This project will aim to design an adaptive, multi-part scoring system as the basis for prioritization of mitigation factors. This system will account for differences in commodities, metal combinations, soil-plant interactions and geochemistry, processing methods, and impact of these terms on the mean and variability of the metal concentrations of interest. This method should assess approaches to mitigation, helping prioritize methods that are both effective and achievable. In both risk and mitigation assessments, results will highlight research gaps, new research and action priorities, and propose a ranked and detailed set of proposed solutions.
Institution: University of Arkansas
Principal Investigator: Benjamin Runkle, PhD
Date Awarded: April 13, 2022
This research is supported by the IAFNS Food and Chemical Safety Committee.
Beverage Caffeine Intake Study
A large variety of new caffeinated beverage products have entered the market in recent years, including new types of energy drinks, cold brew and ready-to-drink specialty coffees and teas, and caffeinated waters and sports drinks. With shifts towards remote work and learning, online food and grocery ordering, and rapid pickup and delivery options for consumers, an updated evaluation of beverage consumption patterns and caffeine intakes in the U.S. population is warranted. The study will provide a current perspective on caffeinated beverage consumption patterns and caffeine intakes from a nationally representative sample of the U.S. population.
Institutions: Penn State, Kantar
Principal Investigator: Diane Mitchell, MS, RD, Penn State
Year Awarded: 2021
This work was supported by the IAFNS Caffeine Committee.
Identify Safety Barriers to Broad Adoption of Recycled Polyolefins for Food Packaging
Defining a path to the production of clean recycled plastics is key to their sustainable use in food and beverage packaging. Despite significant advances in recycling science, obstacles remain to broad utilization of recycled plastics including the need for reliable and predictable sources of safe and inexpensive post-consumer products. This project will identify key elements in generating clean recycled plastic such as polyethylene terephthalate (PET) and use that as a model for improving safety of recycled “challenging” plastics such as polyolefins. The project will also identify potentially hazardous intentionally and non-intentionally added substances (NIAS) in recycled plastic and sources of contamination. Lastly, the project will lead to a roadmap to resolve safety issues and enhance adoption of a wide range of recycled plastics.
Institution: Iowa State University
Principal Investigator: Greg Curtzwiler
Year Awarded: 2021
Read more: Expanding Plastics Recycling Technologies: Chemical Aspects, Technology Status and Challenges
Read more: Global Plastic Waste Recycling and Extended Producer Responsibility Laws
This work is supported by the IAFNS Food Packaging Safety & Sustainability Committee.
Advancing Exposure Assessment for Food Contaminants Through Implementation of Probabilistic Modeling
Risk assessments for foods, ingredients and additives have evolved over the past few decades to incorporate new techniques such as benchmark dose modeling, and to further develop the utility of tools such as the threshold of toxicological concern, and even to explore advancements in carcinogen risk assessment. However, exposure assessments still tend to rely on deterministic approaches utilizing conservative inputs. Deterministic assessments are easy to conduct and easy to interpret; however, as point estimates of exposure, they do not account for variability in the level and/or likelihood of occurrence of a chemical or population differences in exposure inputs. Probabilistic assessments can further refine deterministic assessments using distributions for various exposure inputs and, as such, better account for exposure uncertainty. This project will survey the current state of adoption of probabilistic exposure modeling by regulatory agencies to inform risk management decisions and regulations for food contaminants, develop criteria for determining high quality distributions for input variables, and highlight the value of further integration of probabilistic exposure assessments into regulatory frameworks, including a discussion of factors that hinder widespread adoption.
Institution: Risk Science International
Principal Investigator: Greg Paoli, Principal Risk Scientist
Year Awarded: 2021
This work is supported by the IAFNS Food and Chemical Safety Committee.
Simulating Powdered Product Sampling to Improve Food Safety Sampling Plans
Drawing accurate conclusions about whether an ingredient or finished product is safe based on the results of a test is important to the evaluation and management of food safety risk. With the expected prevalence of contamination in today’s food system at less than 1%, extremely large samples sizes are required to reliably detect contamination, and the potential for false negatives during routine sampling is high. It is therefore critical that samples are representative of the ingredient or product being evaluated, and that sampling plans maximize the probability of finding a target hazard -- particularly as contamination patterns are often heterogeneous rather than uniform. This project will leverage a recently-developed bulk product simulation model to create a publicly available model used to detect low-prevalence, low-level contamination in powdered products and ingredients, such as powdered milk and cocoa powder.
Institution: University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign
Principal Investigator: Matthew Stasiewicz, PhD
Year Awarded: 2021
Publication on Simulation Evaluation Of Power Of Sampling Plans
Access the interactive web app designed to run sampling simulation
- An extended tutorial/user video to utilize the app can be found here
View this project on the Center for Open Science’s Open Science Framework.
- This project was referenced in a Perspectives paper published in the Journal of Dairy Science.
Learn more about the IAFNS Food Microbiology Committee.