Overview

Since the first edition of this review was issued in 2000, a substantial amount of experimental work has been carried out to investigate and assess the influence that food contact rubbers have on the food products that they come into contact with. The FSA in the UK has been responsible for a lot of progress that has been made in this area, due to its willingness to fund large research projects and the results obtained by these are featured in this report.

Since 2000, considerable progress has also been made towards harmonisation of the rubber in contact with food legislation throughout Europe. The CoE draft resolution on rubber in contact with food was formally adopted at the end of 2004 and efforts will now be made to refine the list of ingredients in the resolution (the inventory list in Technical document No 1) so that, in time, a Directive may be forthcoming. This is expected to be a long process, however, and may take a number of years.

Another area where notable progress has been made is in the development and proliferation of sophisticated analytical instrumentation. Almost without exception laboratories undertaking food contact work now have an LC-MS to complement their GC-MS, and the major ones will already have second generation versions of these the LC-MSxMS and GCxGC-MS techniques. Work is progressing well to generate validated methods using these instruments and their presence has enabled considerable advances to be made in the accurate analysis of difficult species...