Safety assessment of the process WIP, based on Starlinger deCON technology, used to recycle post-consumer PET into food contact materials

EFSA Journal
EFSA Panel on Food Contact Materials, Enzymes and Processing Aids (CEP)Evgenia Lampi

Abstract

The EFSA Panel on Food Contact Materials, Enzymes and Processing Aids (CEP) assessed the safety of the recycling process WIP (EU register number RECYC187), which uses the Starlinger deCON technology. The input material is hot washed and dried poly(ethylene terephthalate) (PET) flakes originating from collected post-consumer PET containers, e.g. bottles, including no more than 5% PET from non-food consumer applications. The flakes are preheated before being submitted to solid-state polycondensation (SSP) in a continuous reactor at high temperature under vacuum and gas flow. Having examined the challenge test provided, the Panel concluded that the preheating (step 2) and the decontamination in the continuous SSP reactor (step 3) are critical in determining the decontamination efficiency of the process. The operating parameters to control the performance of these critical steps are temperature, pressure, residence time and gas flow rate. It was demonstrated that this recycling process is able to ensure a level of migration of potential unknown contaminants into food below the conservatively modelled migration of 0.1 μg/kg food. Therefore, the Panel concluded that the recycled PET obtained from this process is not considered to be ...Continue Reading

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