Food contact: the experts convene

The third national scientific Food Contact Expert congress was held in Desenzano del Garda, on 25th and 26th June, organized by the Italian AIBO-FCE sector association under the patronage of the Istituto Italiano Imballaggio.

It was an opportunity for a technical and scientific update on food contact materials and articles, as well as an opportunity to meet up for  testing laboratory experts, certification bodies, consulting firms, manufacturers and distributors of analysis and test instrumentation as well as packaging raw materials.
• Introduced and moderated by Valter Rocchelli (Ircpack), in the first day environmental issues featured, with talks on the role of packaging in reducing impact (DNV GL - Business Assurance), the reduction of CO2 emissions (Group FLO) and compostable coffee biocapsules (Chelab Srl), followed by a report on new gas for protective atmosphere (University of Gastronomic Sciences of Pollenzo con Rivoira) and declaration of conformity for food contact adhesives (Henkel Italy).

In the afternoon the following topics were broached: “Assessing and managing information about the substances contained in the new safety data sheets” (Normachem), “GMP: A Practical Approach” (Intertek Italy), “Analytical techniques applied to food contact” (Ecol Studio), “International Comparison of analytical approaches for food contact compliance” (CSI - IMQ Group).
•The June 26th session, conducted by Maurizio Boccacci Mariani of Università la Sapienza, Rome, dealt with packaging and hygiene in clean rooms (pH Srl and TÜV Italy); risk assessment and food packaging (WG Toxicology Pavia); standard compliant tools and solutions for packaging (AMD Electronic); mineral oils and contaminants in paper and cardboard (BASF); metal detectors and X-rays compared (Mettler-Toledo); new PP random copolymers (Repsol); low migration inks: the UV approach (Stehlin + Hostag, hubergroup). The conference ended with the demonstration of a series of examples of problem solving (Sepack-Lab).