Food Contact: end-of-year updates (2015)

Account and contents of the “Food Contact Materials and Articles” seminar, organized by the Istituto Italiano Imballaggio and the Italian National Institute of Health (ISS).

After the success of the international conference at Baveno (that next year will be repeated 23 to 25 September, as vice president Anna Paola Cavanna of Cavanna Laminati announced during the event), on December 18, Milan, the Istituto Italiano Imballaggio organized the annual “Food Contact Materials and Articles” (FCM) seminar, providing the latest updates on food safety.

Aimed at food chain concerns, marketed product safety heads, laboratory and research institutes, this year the event witnessed the increased presence of public bodies (local health authorities etc.) with a major role in control phases. Part of the Packaging Education activity promoted by the Istituto, the seminar was conducted by Italian Health Institute experts and ably and masterfully coordinated by Maria Rosaria Milana.
The following took their turns at the microphone of the Grand Visconti Palace Hotel Milan conference room: the selfsame M.R. Milana, who provided an overview of FCM legislation and then presented the report on plastics legislation prepared by Roberta Feliciani, unable to attend for reasons of force majeur; Massimo Denaro, who summarized the contents of the draft guideline on testing migration from plastics currently being defined at Community level; Cinzia Gesumundo, who provided updates on legislation governing metallic materials. In the afternoon updates were presented on individual materials (aluminium, handled with the usual verve by Antonino Maggio, and paper and paperboard by Giorgio Padula), audits (Oronzo Panico summarised the CAST guidelines) and criticalities regarding FCM within the RASFF (Rapid Alert System for Food and Feed), effectively broached by Veruscka Mannoni.
The ISS experts then faced the questions from the public, starting out with those from Giorgio Bottini (Goglio), as ever stimulating, that enabled a useful clarification: food contact with metals legislation also covers processing and packaging machine builders, who are in turn required to provide users with the relevant certificate of conformity.

For more information and details, please refer to our Packmedia webmagazine.