European Union Reference Laboratory for Food Contact Materials

Ensuring that what we eat is safe does not stop at testing the food itself. Everything that comes in contact with food as it is produced, packaged, transported, stored, prepared and consumed also needs to be safe.

Materials such as plastics, paper and board, metals, ceramics are commonly used for the manufacturing of food packaging, but also kitchenware and cutlery and food processing equipments. The safety of such materials relies on insuring that during contact there is no migration of unsafe levels of chemical substances from the material to the food.

The activities on food contact materials at the Joint Research Centre provide scientific support to EU policies on food safety. We are the European Reference Laboratory for Food Contact Materials (EURL-FCM). The EURL-FCM provides scientific and technical assistance to the EU and the member States and conducts training courses for the benefit of National Reference Laboratories (NRLs) and of experts from developing countries. It is supported by a Network of National Reference Laboratories.

Our website contains the following sections.

Section About us informs you about the background of our work.

The following sections report on the results of our work:

• Guidance documents reports about our technical guidance documents and calculators
• Research for policy support reports on our experimental research, such as migration of bisphenol A
• Migration methods is shows overall and specific migration methods
  
• Interlaboratory comparisons reports on the comparisons that have been performed and that are running
• Reference substances gives information of all the substances that we have in our reference collection
• Training reports on the training that we organise
• Workshops and conferences reports on the workshops and conferences that we organised
  
• Publications list all our products

Section Contact shows how you can contact us.