Development and validation of a multi-analyte GC-MS method for the determination of 84 substances from plastic food contact materials

Chemical substances shall not migrate from food contact materials (FCM) at levels that are potentially harmful for the consumers. Each of the current analytical methods applied to verify the migration of substances from FCM covers only one or few substances. There is a very limited number of publications on the development of analytical methods allowing the simultaneous determination of several classes of FCM substances, and almost none of them reported methods entirely dedicated to the ones in the positive list of Commission Regulation (EU) No. 10/2011 for plastic FCMs. Therefore, a simple, sensitive and reliable multi-analyte method was developed for the simultaneous determination of 84 substances in food simulants. It employs an optimised liquid-liquid extraction with dichloromethane as extraction solvent in the presence of 10 % m/v NaCl, followed by quantitative analysis with Gas Chromatography coupled to Mass Spectrometry (GC-MS). A combination of total-ion chromatograms (TICs) and extracted-ion chromatograms (EICs) was used. The optimisation and validation of the method have been carried out according to current international guidelines. Adequate sensitivity was demonstrated in the selected concentration ranges for most of the analytes, with limits of quantification (LOQs) at least three times lower than the legislative limit, when existing. The results showed that the method is sufficiently accurate for the majority of substances, with recoveries between 70–115 % and relative standard deviations (RSDs) smaller than 20 % at three concentration levels. The method was applied to the analysis of some FCM multilayers. The method allows, for the first time, the simultaneous quantification of 84 FCM substances in two of the official food simulants (A and C) at levels of a few ng/g.JRC.F.5-Food and Feed Complianc