The FDA announced on Monday it was publishing its final rule banning three grease-resistant chemical substances used in many pizza boxes and other kinds of food packaging.
The three specific perfluoroalkyl ethyl types have been linked to birth defects and cancer and have been used in everything from pizza boxes, microwave popcorn bags, sandwich wrappers and other products used as a wrapping for foods, reports Food Safety News.
Bowing to pressure, the FDA finally responded to a petition filed on January 7, 2015 by the Natural Resources Defense Council, the Center for Food Safety, the Breast Cancer Fund, the Center for Environmental Health, Clean Water Action, the Center for Science in the Public Interest, Children’s Environmental Health Network, Environmental Working Group (EWF), and Improving Kids’ Environment, saying the agency was going to ban the three chemicals.
EcoWatch points out the FDA’s response has been a long time in coming to ban the three chemicals in the notification. EWG President Ken Cook was quoted by EcoWatch: “Industrial chemicals that pollute people’s blood clearly have no place in food packaging. But it’s taken the FDA more than 10 years to figure that out and it’s banning only three chemicals that aren’t even made anymore.”
The FDA says the final rule will take effect 30 days after it was published in the Federal Register on January 4, 2016. The process also includes the filing of objections as well as a call for public hearings.
The director of the National Resources Defense Council (NRDC) health program, Erik Olson, praised the FDA action citing the potential for safer pizza boxes. “The FDA’s ban is an important first step — but just a first step — toward improving the safety of our food supply. Now it should act on our petition to ban the seven other chemicals we believe — and government agencies such as the toxicology program at the National Institutes of Health have found — cause cancer,” Olson said.
The three specific chemicals in question are:
1. Diethanolamine salts of mono- and bis (1H,1H,2H,2H perfluoroalkyl) phosphates where the alkyl group is even numbered in the range C8-C18 and the salts have a fluorine content of 52.4 percent to 54.4 percent as determined on a solids basis;
2. Pentanoic acid, 4,4-bis [(gamma-omega-perfluoro-C8-20-alkyl)thio] derivatives, compounds with diethanolamine (CAS Reg. No. 71608-61-2); and
3. Perfluoroalkyl substituted phosphate ester acids, ammonium salts formed by the reaction of 2,2 bis[([gamma, [omega]-perfluoro C4-20 alkylthio) methyl]-1,3-propanediol, polyphosphoric acid and ammonium hydroxide.
