Packaging is a critical component which plays a crucial role in food safety process by safeguarding the products from external contaminants, tampering during transportation or any other means as much as possible. But, one should not forget that packaging itself consists of lot of harmful chemicals which are involved in the manufacturing process. And, these chemicals end ups into our food products through the packaging substrates.
“Product safety is the fundamental aim of Yansefu. To serve the purpose of providing safe inks, it is necessary to formulate compliant products following good manufacturing practices. But these efforts are not sufficient enough to ensure product safety of the end user products. We are ardently focussing to utilize our analytical facilities to the maximum with or passionate and determined R&D team to execute high end research and synthesis work, in order to design safe, compliant and innovative products,” said JK Sharma, CEO-Yansefu, India.
Substances like phthalates, widely known as plasticizers since they are used to soften vinyl varnish and make it flexible, are used in printing inks. Di(2-ethylhexyl) phthalate (DEHP) is the most commonly used plasticizers in inks, have tendency to migrate into food through substrate, if no effective barrier is present. “That’s why, Yansefu not only analyses its raw materials before using in any formulation using complex analytical techniques, but also analyses the migration potential of its printing inks prior launching in the market,” added Sharma.
According to Sharma, Yansefu performs migration analysis including theoretical methods and analytical techniques, for every products following appropriate European standards such as Regulation (EU) No. 10/2011, EN1186 and EN13130. In the industry, many software and mathematical tools have been significantly developed to evaluate the maximum extent of migration of a chemical substance into food products. However, Yansefu has developed its own mathematical tool based on European standards, to calculate the migration extent of the chemical in final end-user application during worst foreseeable conditions of use.
The worst case calculation depends on the following parameters including maximum content of a migrant in foodstuff in the worst case, in [µg/kg] i.e. [ppb], mass of liquid ink or coating applied to packaging in [g/m2], content of migrant in ink or coating in [ppm] i.e. [µg/g] and specific surface area of foodstuff in [dm2/kg], is 6 dm2/kg for the cube.
To demonstrate that a packaging ink is likely to meet industry requirements, the ink should be applied to the relevant substrate, the printing and drying process resemble the real industrial conditions as much as possible in such a way the printed and/or laminated articles should reflect the final packaging application as closely as possible.
For migration analysis, the selection of testing conditions, simulants, film weights etc. follow European standards. For instance, Ethanol 95 % ( v/v) serves as a universal simulant for plastics, since it represents the worst case for most of the practical cases listed in the regulation 10/2011. For paper and cardboard Poly(2,6-diphenyl-p-phenylenoxide) or Tenax is the appropriate simulant, these substrates are mostly used for dry and/or fatty filling goods.
Storage conditions of the samples also selected from different testing regimes specifies in Regulation (EU) No. 10/2011 such as 10 days at 40°C, 10 days at 50°C and 10 days at 60°C. The chemical analysis should be done using various analytical techniques like Pyrolysis-gas chromatography/mass spectrometry, Gel permeation chromatography (GPC).The determine the quality and quantity of specific migrants, the analytical methods for targeted analysis are chosen as described in the CEN Standards EN 13130, Parts 2-28.
However, the analysis for NIAS is complex, as the precise identity of the material may be difficult to confirm and reference standards may not be available for calibration. Analysis of raw materials can be helpful in the identification of NIAS for further migration testing.
Analytical facilities available at Yansefu India
The identification of non-intentionally added substances are performed using GC-MS by comparison of obtained component mass spectra to either ‘in-house’ user generated libraries or commercially available libraries. The state-of-the-art analytical lab at Yansefu has all the necessary analytical instruments and equipment to accomplish analysis and research work. Neelakamal Mohapatra, vice president – R&D and innovation, Yansefu, India provided some insights of their analytical facilities and its utilization in the ink industry:
Pyrolyzer – GC-MS, for performing sophisticated analytical technique known as pyrolysis-gas chromatography/mass spectrometry. It is an analytical method to identify the compounds which involves the thermal decomposition of sample into smaller molecules at high temperature (about 300-700°C). These molecules are separated by GC followed by identification via mass spectrometry. This technique is very useful to identify the components of different substances like resins, additives, photo-initiator, pigments are name to few.
Gas Chromatograph (GC) instrument which is used to detect the distinctive kind of solvents present in an ink mixture.
Gel Permeation Chromatograph (GPC), in which a sample is separated into its constituent parts based on their molecular sizes. It is used to find out the number average molecular weight and weight average molecular weight of the polymers constituted in polyols and polyurethanes.
Fourier-transform infrared spectrometer (FTIR) which is used to identify the functional groups of organic and inorganic compounds, and to identify raw materials like pigments, resins and so on.
Centrifuge which works on the principle of sedimentation. It helps to separate the components of ink like pigments, resins immersed solvents basis on their densities. Further, resin system can be identified using either FTIR or GC-MS. These techniques are quite helpful to analyses the composition of unknown ink solution.