Thousands of Food-Packaging Chemicals Lack Safety Data

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...