Safe Packaging Design - Principles, Modeling and Foundations

This article is the first in a series of three devoted to the safe design of packaging made from virgin or recycled materials. The series proposes a tiered approach based on tiers—that is, structured levels of approximation—combining two complementary axes:

• a toxicological approach $T$, which defines the toxicological severity used to calculate migration limits ($SM{L}_i$) ;

• a transfer modeling approach $M$, which describes the sophistication of the physical migration model.

Together, these form a matrix of levels ($T\times M$) that allows the accuracy of the calculation to be selected based on the available data, while ensuring safety by design.

The $T$ increases, the more precise the toxicological knowledge becomes, and the less conservative the estimate is. The more $M$ increases, the more realistic the estimate becomes.

This series of articles specifically addresses the following summarized points:

• This article lays out the fundamentals: formalization of the problem, general concentration model, release potentials, the concept of a functional barrier, severity and criticality scales, and principles for constructing tiers $M_0\text{–}{M}_3$ ;

• The second article details the parameterization of advanced third-order models $M_2$ (realistic partition coefficients) and $M_3$ (diffusion dynamics, diffusivity models);

• Finally, the third article applies these tools to concrete case studies, ranging from the reduction of $C_0$ to functional barriers, with detailed calculations and reproducible SFPPyLite scripts.

Safe design of food packaging involves incorporating food safety constraints...