Comparison of isopropanol and isooctane as food simulants in plasticizer migration tests.

In the last 25 years, plastics have faced a massive demand in packaging technology due to their desirable properties, such as flexibility, light weight, etc. Moreover, their packaging applications have spread in the area of food and pharmaceutical products. Much concern has arisen from that fact as most of these plastics contain high amounts of additives which tend to migrate when they come into contact with liquid or solid surrounding media. Plasticized PVC is one of the most popular polymers in packaging technology and at the same time is subject to criticism for the high concentration levels of plasticizer in most of its applications. In an attempt to carry out simple and realistic migration tests, many investigators used simple organic substances which simulate as much as possible the behaviour of foods towards plasticizer migration. Much of our previous work intended to examine migration of dioctyl phthalate (DOP) from PVC sheets into some simple surrounding media, such as methanol, white spirit, paraffin oil, etc. The present work is focused on the examination of the plasticizer migration into two promising food simulants, namely isopropanol and isooctane. Radioactivity measurements were employed in order to detect quantitatively the plasticizer which had migrated into the surrounding liquid. In contrast to similar studies, the phenomenon of migration was studied until equilibrium was reached.