Effects of consumer use practices on nanosilver release from commercially available food contact materials

ABSTRACT

Migration evaluation involving nano-enabled food contact materials (FCMs) mostly focuses on potential nanoparticle release from new unused products. This may not represent consumer use practices encountered by the FCMs in their lifecycle. In order to determine if product use impacts the release of nanoparticles or other FCM components, it is necessary to perform migration evaluations under typical consumer use scenarios. A quantitative assessment of nanoparticle release from a commercially available nanosilver-enabled cutting board was performed under five conditions intended to simulate consumer use. Knife motion, washing and scratching scenarios were simulated by linear abrasion using knife blades, scrubbing pads and tungsten carbide burr attachments, respectively. Migration was evaluated using water and 3% acetic acid as food simulants. Low concentrations of silver (Ag) were detected in water simulants, a small portion (<4 ng dm⁻²) in the form of silver nanoparticles (AgNPs) with particle number concentrations on the order of 10⁶ particles dm⁻². Median particle diameter was 40 nm. Nanoparticle release into water was observed under all five consumer use scenarios studied, however there was no correlation with the different levels of stress simulated.

KEYWORDS:

• Migration
• nanoparticles
• nanosilver
• cutting boards
• simulated use
• simulant migration
• food contact materials

Acknowledgments

This project was supported in part by an appointment to the Research Participation Program at the Center for Food Safety and Applied Nutrition administered by the Oak Ridge Institute for Science and Education through an interagency agreement between the U.S. Consumer Product Safety Commission and the U.S. Food and Drug Administration. The authors would like to thank Dr. Todor Todorov for the LA-ICP-MS analysis. The authors would also like to acknowledge the FDA White Oak Nanotechnology Core Facility for instrument use.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Supplementary Material

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