⚗️Chemicals of Concern

When evaluating the health impact of a food packaging item, the UP Scorecard essentially considers the presence of hazardous chemicals and whether they are likely to migrate from the food contact material to the food or beverage content. In more detail, the following criteria contribute to the final COC score:

• Compliance statement: are there any chemicals of concern, that are intentionally added during manufacturing? We provide a list of chemicals of concern. The chemicals of concern within this list are prioritized and grouped into four tiers, where Tier 1 presents a shortlist of priority chemicals of concern to avoid, and Tiers 2, 3, and 4 present more extensive sets of chemicals that should not be used in the manufacture of food contact materials.

• What is the disclosure level for the compliance statement?

• Migration potential: How inert is the material?

• Food/material interaction: How do the container and food interact?

By default, the UP Scorecard considers that all food contact materials contain at least one chemical of concern from Tier 1.

	Default	Customizable?	Comment
Compliance statement	Intentionally contains at least one COC identified in Tier 1	Yes	If the user has any information about the intentional utilization of COCs, they can declare compliance with one or more COC tiers.
Disclosure level	Supplier is unable to provide information about in-scope chemicals of concern in the materials within the foodware or packaging component	Yes	The user can support their compliance statement with different levels of reliability (from self-declaration to third-party verified declaration).
Inertness	Glass, steel & ceramic: best score All other materials: lowest score	No	See Inertness explanation.
Food and material interaction	Worst case food: hot, oily, acidic soup	Yes	Users may either select one of the predefined food or drink options, or create their own (see Food or beverage content)

The Chemicals of Concern information can be changed when creating a new product or editing an existing product.