Migration of non intentionally added substances from adhesives by UPLC-Q-TOF/MS and the role of EVOH to avoid migration in multilayer packaging materials

Polyurethane adhesives are commonly used to laminate multilayer packaging materials for food. Since these materials are in direct contact with the food, compounds could migrate from adhesive into it. For this reason, it is important to identify all the potential migrants and verify their migration. Ultra-high performance liquid chromatography-quadrupole time-of-flight-mass spectrometry analyses and ChemSpider database are used to identify the potential migrants from polyurethane adhesives, and these techniques were demonstrated to be very powerful and useful tools for this purpose. Migration tests were carried out using Tenax® as food simulant. Nine out of fifteen non-volatile compounds, identified in the cured adhesives, migrated. Most of them were identified as cyclic compounds, adipic based, which is the most commonly used monomer to make the polyester/polyol resins for polyurethane bi-component adhesives. In this work, the use of EvOH layer in several multilayer materials to minimize or avoid migration was evaluated too.