December 19, 2018

 

Alarm raised over plastic traces in UK feed recycled from waste food
 

 

The recycling of waste food - some of which are still packaged - into animal feed in the UK had led to depositing of plastic bits in the feed itself, according to a Guardian report.

 

Andrew Rock, a farmer in Lincolnshire, told the newspaper that he had discovered plastic shreds in the animal feed and, after scooping out a kilo of feed for multiple weeks, claimed to have "found plastic in nearly every scoop."

 

Upon contacting his suppliers, Rock was shocked to realise that the plastic fragments were not deposited by accident, but were in fact "a legal part" of the recycling process which apparently did not remove plastic packaging from waste food turned into animal feed, the Guardian pointed out.

   

In the UK, more than 650,000 tonnes of unused food of various kinds are recycled into animal feed each year. However, the system meant to take off plastic wrappings from these products could not remove all of those. Hence, the UK's Food Standards Agency (FSA) imposed a limit of 0.15% of plastic in recycled animal feed. On the other hand, the official EU limit is zero.

Nevertheless, Rock claimed that suppliers - when asked whether the recycled feeds are safe for consumption - told him that the products were within legal limits and came from a third-party mill accredited by Ufas, the Universal Feed Assurance Scheme.

Ufas is a voluntary scheme, run by the Agricultural Industries Confederation. They told the Guardian they were going to investigate complaints made by Rock. However, confidentiality agreements could prevent the disclosure of their findings.

Some experts had warned of the long-term impact of plastic residues on both animal and human health.

"...the only level of plastic in animal feed should be none at all," said Dr. Heather Leslie, an ecotoxicologist who specialises in microplastics at the Vrije University in Amsterdam.

Dr. Leslie also criticised the "lack of transparency" on what animals - from which meat are extracted for food - are fed.

"Tiny microplastics can be released from larger pieces during feed processing and the smaller fractions are, we think, even more risky for the animal's health," Dr. Leslie elaborated.

"We've known for decades that after ingestion, fine plastic particles cross the mammalian gut barrier and enter the bloodstream. It's already been tested in pigs, dogs, rats and also in chickens. From the bloodstream, they can be transported to tissues and organs. We know this from studies with rats."

Dr. Stephanie Wright, a research associate at King's College London, highlighted the risk of chemicals leaching from plastics.

"The chemicals at microscopic level in the network that make up plastic, [that are used] to give flexibility, or flame retardent properties, they can come off very easily, they are susceptible to leaching. This is why BPA [a chemical found in food packaging] was banned from baby bottles, because it leached into the milk from the plastic," she said.

Yet, she also warned that it would be hard to know if plastic in animal feed is a critical factor affecting both animals and humans given that the chemical impact from the environment around them is extremely significant.

For now, efforts had been made to ensure that plastic traces in recycled waste food are strictly kept to a minimum, said Paul Featherstone, chairman of the UK Former Foodstuffs Processors Association and group director of animal feed producer SugaRich.

"In line with the vast majority of EU countries, we have a tolerance of 0.15% by weight of plastic residue. We don't set that as a target, we want to be way, way beneath that. We don't want to be putting anything injurious to an animal into feed," Featherstone said.

In addition, the Food Standards Agency commented that it is "unlikely that the levels of microplastic particles that have been reported to occur in certain types of food would cause harm to consumers."

- Guardian