We don’t often look with suspicion at the plastic wrapping a block of cheddar, the waxed carton containing milk, or the plastic bottle of ketchup. We expect food packaging to be more or less inert—breakfast isn’t supposed to come with a side of chemicals, after all.
But evidence suggests that many food-contact materials, as food packaging is known, leach chemicals into the products they house. The most famous of these is likely bisphenol A (BPA), an ingredient in plastic that is a potent endocrine disrupter. In 2025, the E.U. banned BPA’s use in food-contact materials, and in the U.S. it’s banned in baby bottles, sippy cups, and formula packaging.
But when one chemical is demonized, its replacement may not be any safer, says Helene Weisinger, a chemist at the Swiss nonprofit Food Packaging Forum. (BPA, for instance, is often replaced with BPS, which turns out to have similar issues.) It’s “chemical whack-a-mole,” Weisinger says.
In a recent paper in Environmental Science and Technology, she and her colleagues propose a new system for avoiding this situation, in which chemically similar substances are grouped together and may be banned or regulated together, rather than one by one—an idea that could simplify what’s proving to be a difficult process.
A lack of safety information about food packaging
The chemicals we encounter in daily life aren’t well understood. “There’s 350,000 chemicals that are put on global markets, and for a lot of those, we have relatively little information about their toxicity. They’ve not been exhaustively tested,” says Olwenn Martin, an associate professor in health and environment at University College London who was not involved in the new research. “That’s something that, in my world, is well known, and probably for the general public would come as a bit of a shock.”
Chemicals used in food packaging are little different; the health effects of relatively few are well-understood. Out of about 15,000 chemicals used in food-contact materials, 1,222 have known major health risks, the researchers state in the new paper, while there is little information on most of the others. “People kept asking us, ‘We can’t do measurements for 15,000 chemicals. What should we really be concerned about?’ And that is kind of how we started off with the study,” says Weisinger.
The team sorted known food-contact chemicals into structurally related groups, identifying 38 groups where many of the members had clear health risks. Each group contained numerous compounds whose health effects are still a question mark, which the researchers point out should be addressed in future studies. But even in the absence of further toxicological work, says Martin, this information could be used to regulate similar chemicals en masse, helping to avoid chemical whack-a-mole.
“The backlog is such that it would take hundreds, if not thousands, of years to test all of these chemicals at current rates, and even regulatory bodies are looking at different ways of doing this,” she says. “One of the ways is by grouping chemicals: looking at chemicals that are fairly similar—structurally or through other means—to be able to make assumptions about chemicals in this group and regulate them as a group.”
Regulating chemicals can make a big difference in reducing people’s exposure, if done correctly, says Martin Wagner, a biologist at the Norwegian University of Science and Technology who studies the health effects of plastics and who was not involved in the new research. As a result of stricter rules in Europe against BPA and other dangerous substances, “we’re seeing in European populations that levels of exposure to phthalates and to regulated bisphenols, BPA and so on, are dropping, which is a good thing, “ he says. “But at the same time, we see that the level of exposure in Europeans to all these alternative chemicals is increasing.” Banning entire groups of chemicals might stop this kind of unfortunate substitution.
The push to put safety first
Even if governments grouped chemicals to lighten the regulatory load, there are still many substances to be assessed—some of them that even the people making the materials may not know about. “The problem with food-contact materials and with plastics is that these are really incredibly complex materials, and our research in the lab is showing they contain a lot of unknown chemicals,” says Wagner.
Plastics manufacturing, for instance, involves chemical steps that are known to generate other products, and contaminants are not uncommon in the materials used to make food-contact materials. “We call them non-intentionally added substances,” says Wagner. “We have no way of making sure that all these compounds are safe. Yet we know that these are leaching into food, into water. So people are very likely to be exposed to that complex mixture of compounds with very little oversight.”
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