Balancing sustainability and chemical safety in food packaging: A focused scoping review and safe-and-sustainable design decision framework

Food packaging protects products and supports distribution, but food-contact materials can also transfer chemicals or particles under particular use conditions. This focused scoping review maps 60 retained records from 214 Scopus records identified on 5 June 2026; 93 records underwent thematic eligibility assessment. The four-block search required packaging, migration, named contaminant and safety terms together, so the corpus illustrates selected concerns rather than the frequency of migrants across all food-contact materials. Evidence was separated into occurrence, migration, exposure, risk and design categories without pooled estimates or a completed study-level risk-of-bias assessment. The mapped studies describe phthalates, bisphenols, per- and polyfluoroalkyl substances, photoinitiators, oligomers, non-intentionally added substances and particles across conventional, recycled and bio-based systems. Their findings depend on material composition and contact conditions; detection in packaging alone does not establish exposure or harm. Targeted methods, non-targeted screening, bioassays and models can address different decision questions, but none alone establishes safety. A proposed safe-and-sustainable-by-design decision rule requires material-specific chemical and migration evidence and applicable regulatory checks before environmental benefits are compared between viable alternatives. Unidentified migrants trigger further characterization, exposure refinement or mixture testing rather than an assumed safety finding. The framework is a transparent design aid, not a validated quantitative scoring system.