Welcome to Keep It Organic

Published: 25 August 2006
Category: Uncategorized
Welcome to Keep It Organic.This site hopes to provide important facts about organic foods, trends and consumer interest. If you want pure food you need pure packaging One important and sometimes overlooked segment of the organic movement is the packaging. The organic consumer is the most concerned shopper today. It is curious that even some organic consumers who study their organic purchases for contents and chemical residue, are not as aware of the impact the packaging of that food can have on the chemicals that may migrate into the food from the container. However, lately, the focus of food manufactures and concerned consumers has moved to the impact packaging materials may have on human biological and genetic processes. Scientist continues to raise concerns over the increasing “endocrine disruptors.” Scientist are beginning to study and quantify the accumulating impact of chemicals on reproductive, puberty, brain activities, and sexual behavior. Suspected disruptive chemicals include plasticizers such as bisphenol A (BPA) and phthalates or polyethylene terphthalate (PET) plastic packaging.

The FDA has taken note.

Glass is the only mass-produced packaging material to be recognized by the Federal Food and Drug Administration as “generally recognized  as safe” (GRAS). And the FDA is studying the problem of recycled plastic in food packaging. They have provided new “guidance” to industry:

“It is possible, however, that traces of a toxic substance could be carried through a 2° or 3° recycling process, become a part of the packaging, and migrate into food in contact with the packaging. Although subsequent recycling of the packaging will result in dilution of the toxin, a very low steady-state concentration of certain toxins could conceivably develop in the recycled material over the long term. Therefore, there is a potential for a consumer to be exposed to low concentrations of a particular toxin over a long period of time. In order to develop a recommendation for the maximum acceptable level(s) of residual contaminants in the recycled material, FDA has considered the question of risk in a probabilistic way rather than on a compound-by-compound basis.”

Guidance for Industry Use of Recycled Plastics in Food Packaging: Chemistry Considerations 8/22/06 Office of Food Additive Safety Division of Food Contact Notifications HFS-275 (PDF) site