Presence of microplastics and nanoplastics in food, with particular focus on seafood
By L. Hoogenboom. EFSA journal. European Food Safety Authority, 2016
888 citations recorded by the source corpus.
Abstract Following a request from the German Federal Institute for Risk Assessment (BfR), the EFSA Panel for Contaminants in the Food Chain was asked to deliver a statement on the presence of microplastics and nanoplastics in food, with particular focus on seafood. Primary microplastics are plastics originally manufactured to be that size, while secondary microplastics originate from fragmentation. Nanoplastics can originate from engineered material or can be produced during fragmentation of microplastic debris. Microplastics range from 0.1 to 5,000 μm and nanoplastics from approximately 1 to 100 nm (0.001–0.1 μm). There is no legislation for microplastics and nanoplastics as contaminants in food. Methods are available for identification and quantification of microplastics in food, including seafood. Occurrence data are limited. In contrast to microplastics no methods or occurrence data in food are available for nanoplastics. Microplastics can contain on average 4% of additives and the plastics can adsorb contaminants. Both additives and contaminants can be of organic as well of inorganic nature. Based on a conservative estimate the presence of microplastics in seafood would have a small effect on the overall exposure to additives or contaminants. Toxicity and toxicokinetic data are lacking for both microplastics and nanoplastics for a human risk assessment. It is recommended that analytical methods should be further developed for microplastics and developed for nanoplastics and standardised, in order to assess their presence, identity and to quantify their amount in food. Furthermore, quality assurance should be in place and demonstrated. For microplastics and nanoplastics, occurrence data in food, including effects of food processing, in particular, for the smaller sized particles (< 150 μm) should be generated. Research on the toxicokinetics and toxicity, including studies on local effects in the gastrointestinal (GI) tract, are needed as is research on the degradation of microplastics and potential formation of nanoplastics in the human GI tract.
Subfields: Biomaterials, Industrial and Manufacturing Engineering, Pollution
View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/252b7f8cc66b8506b0c22ac6b4fc6f1548abc6bd
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Citations in the corpus
- Microplastics with adsorbed contaminants: Mechanisms and Treatment (2021, background): “This turns out to be problematic because of ifficulty of quantification and identification of nanoplastics (NPs), articularly in edible items (EFSA Panel, 2016 ).”
- Microplastics in fisheries and aquaculture (2017, methodology): “Interactions of micro- and nanoplastics with the immune system may potentially lead to immunotoxicity and might be associated with several adverse outcomes: 1) immunosuppression (decreased host resistance to infectious agents and tumours); 2) immune activation (increased risk of developing allergic ”
- Impact of Microplastics and Nanoplastics on Human Health (2021, background): “There are also a number of products that use commercially manufactured nanoplastics, and these will also become plastic waste in the seas and on land, and eventually find their way into the food supply chain [9,45].”