A food safety expert has urged that China's paper cups must meet national quality standards as his latest survey showed some paper cups on sale contained cancer-causing chemicals, the Legal Daily reports.
The International Food Packaging Association (IFPA), a Hong Kong-based non-governmental organization, recently conducted a survey on disposable paper cups in north China's Beijing, Tianjin and Hebei province, covering 47 kinds in 8 supermarkets and 16 kinds in 4 agricultural wholesale markets.
Although more paper cups tagged with Quality Safety (QS) marks went into markets as the government tightened measures to improve quality, the survey found that some paper cups without QS marks were still on sale.
At an agricultural wholesale market in Hebei's Shijiazhuang, fluorescent dots were found at the bottom of some paper cups and they were too soft to fill water with.
"The fluorescent dots come from potentially cancer-causing chemical fluorescent agents that are added during the cups' production." Dong Jinshi, executive vice-president of the IFPA, said.
According to Dong, presently there are over 2,000 registered enterprises of paper food packaging in China and the number of unregistered workshops may be at 20,000.
However, China has only industrial standards for the disposal paper cups and industrial standards are not compulsory for enterprises to follow.
Due to the lack of national quality standards, recycled paper, discarded polyethylene and medical waste were used to produce paper cups. Moreover, solvent inks are mainly used in domestic food packaging. Dong noted that such solvent inks include many poisonous solvent chemicals such as benzene and methylbenzene. Excessive content of benzene would cause cancers especially in the blood system.
"Therefore, the government should issue national quality standards for paper cups as soon as possible to make consumers feel reassured that they can safely use paper cups," Dong said.
