ORGANIC ENVIRONMENTAL CONTAMINANTS IN FOOD

Organic industrial chemicals are essential in aU aspects of life and enter the atmosphere, with higher atmospheric concentrations near the sites of production or use. Also it is well documented that food will absorb organic species as a result of migration when in contact with plastic packaging. Therefore food grown, produced, transported or stored in a contaminated environment, i.e. in the proximity of an atmospheric discharge, may become contaminated due to migration from the air. The aim of this work was to test the "chemical discharge -> atmospheric contaminant -> food contaminant" model. Four case histories, undertaken to test this model, are presented here. Initial studies focused on tetrachloroethylene contamination of food from shops near to and distant from dry cleaning stores. Tetrachloroethylene was detected in butter/lard from all shops near but absent at three of the four distant shops. Chloroform, 1,1,1-trichloroethane and trichlorofluoromethane were also detected. The contamination of food purchased from filling stations with volatile aromatic compounds from petrol and diesel was studied. The data suggested contamination to occur in this way but there appeared to be other sources of these compounds that in some cases appeared to dominate. It is tentatively suggested that the same compounds from motor vehicles contaminate food in shops alongside busy roads. The remaining two case histories involved food from around chemical production plants. One used milk and liver samples from cattle kept on farms adjacent to a plant and the other chocolate bars from canteens of another plant. In both cases there was little evidence to suggest contamination of local food due to the activities of these plants. These case histories suggested obtaining random food samples from near to discharges provided data for testing of the model but site variability makes the prediction of consumer exposure difficult without sampling of food at each site. As an alternative approach laboratory studies were undertaken with simple exposure chambers and spiked atmospheres to investigate the transfer of atmospheric contaminants into foodstuffs and living plants to develop transfer models to determine if infrequent sampling of air around the food chain is any measure of contamination reaching the consumer. The quantitative aspects of these studies were limited by the design of the exposure chambers but the data suggests this to be a viable approach for the estimation of consumer exposure.

Name dc:type.qualificationname

PhD

Level dc:type.qualificationlevel

Doctoral

Grantor dc:publisher.institution

De Montfort University

Year dc:date.issued

1993

Author dc:creator

• WILLIAMS, KEVAN JOHN

Licence

• https://dora.dmu.ac.uk/bitstreams/f99d1ee9-95b4-4ec5-9b65-1c771b328c2d/download