To check the compliance of a plastic food contact material with the existing European Union (EU) regulations, overall and specific migration tests shall be carried out using the food simulants and the test conditions specified in EU Directive 97/48/EC. However, the experimental determination of a specific migration into a food simulant is often a complex analytical task, which requires a considerable amount of work, time, and expertise and hence costs for the petitioner. Moreover, in a certain number of cases it is even impossible to obtain reliable experimental migration data because of technical/analytical problems, chemical degradation/volatilisation of the migrant, or non-availability of an appropriate analytical method.

Therefore, Directive 97/48/EC foresees the possibility of carrying out substitute or alternative fast migration tests if it is generally recognised on the basis of scientific evidence that the results obtained are equal to or higher than those obtained in the test with olive oil, which represents the "WORST CASE" test.

In the last decades, numerous scientific investigations have demonstrated that migration of small organic molecules from a plastic material into a liquid substance is a theoretically predictable physical process. But the challenge was to prove that the migration estimation could become a recognized method by EU legislation. Eventually, the combined effort of a number of experts from a series of EU member states led to the conclusion that, based on the scientific evidence which is nowadays available, the migration estimation is, for certain types of polymers and migrants, a validated method to check for compliance with the existing EU consumer protection regulations⁽¹⁾.

⁽¹⁾ K. Hinrichs and O. Piringer (editors), 2002, "Evaluation of migration models to used under Directive 90/128/EEC", Final report contract SMT4-CT98-7513, European Commission, Directorate General for Research, Report-EUR 20604EN, Brussels.