Migration Behavior And Safety Assessment Of Mineral Oil Saturated Hydrocarbons(MOSH) In Food Packaging Paper

Mineral oil is a by-product of petroleum refining process. During the process of food packaging paper and the use of recycled paper, mineral oil would be introduced and to contaminate food. In this paper, migration behavior and safety assessment of mineral oil saturated hydrocarbons(MOSH) in food packaging paper were studied. The details were as follows:( 1) The solid phase extraction-gas chromatography was developed for determination of MOSH in food packaging paper. N-hexane/ethanol(1:1, V/V) as the extraction solvent, the immersion, ultrasonic and microwave assisted extraction method were compared and optimized. Extract was purified by silver nitrate silica gel column; MOSH of food packaging paper was determinated with GC-FID. The results showed that the optimum for ultrasonic extraction: extraction time 20 min, temperature 30 ℃, extraction times 2 and solid to liquid ratio 10:1. The calibration curve of paraffin oil was linear in the range of 20-500 mg/L with correlation coefficient 0.9996. The limit of detection and the limit of quantitation were 2.57 mg/L and 7.79 mg/L, respectively. And the recoveries were between 79.0 % and 86.5 %, with relative standard deviation(RSD) less than 5.0 %, the RSD of intra-day and inter-day were less than 3.0 %.(2)Migration behavior of MOSH from four styles of food packaging paper into food simulant Tenax was researched. It was shown that thickness and grammage of the food packaging paper had an important effect on migration of MOSH at a certain temperature, the smaller the thickness and grammage, the greater the MOSH migration rate. Under certain conditions, the higher the temperature, the time of migration balance was shorter for MOSH(100 ℃, 100 minutes and 25 ℃, 8 days), and the greater the migration rate(100 ℃, 24.8 % and 25 ℃, 7.8 %). The migration amount of MOSH from determinate packaging paper at equilibrium were beyond JECFA specific migration limit of 0.6 mg/kg, and the migration of MOSH was mainly concentrated on C16~C18 and C23~C26, they belonged to the low and medium viscosity mineral oil which was easy to accumulate in the human body.(3)Threshold of toxicology concern(TTC), Cramer classification and Toxtree software were used to establish safety assessment method for mineral oil. The results showed that the migration of MOSH hydrocarbons belonged to the Class I, the estimated daily intake(EDI) of MOSH from four types of food packaging paper into Tenax was markedly higher than corresponding threshold(1.8 mg/person·day). This result should attract much more attention from us.