| Abstract | | Shipping of edible fats and oils into Europe is permitted in bulk tanks, in which substances included in a positive list were transported. The European Commission requested EFSA to evaluate a list of substances as acceptable previous cargoes. The Panel on Contaminants in the Food Chain (CONTAM Panel) based this evaluation on its recent review of the SCF criteria for acceptable previous cargoes and criteria proposed by the Codex Committee for Fats and Oils (CCFO). The CONTAM Panel considered that calcium nitrate, ammonium nitrate, the double salt and solutions of these as well as hydrogen peroxide, isobutanol, kaolin slurry and fructose would not be of health concern as previous cargoes. The Panel considered that unfractionated fatty acid/alcohol mixtures or mixtures of fatty acids/alcohols would not cause any health concern as previous cargoes, provided their sources are edible types of oils and fats. Likewise, only fatty ester mixtures produced from fatty acids and fatty alcohols derived from edible types of fats and oils, as well as methanol and ethanol, would not cause any health concern as previous cargoes, provided the sources of fatty esters mixtures are restricted to non-contaminated sources excluding such as oils from waste collection sites. Because of toxicological concern and/or lack of data, the CONTAM Panel considered that cyclohexanol, cyclohexanone and 2,3-butanediol did not meet the criteria for acceptability as previous cargoes. In the case of epoxidised vegetable oils, the Panel had no information about what entities might be covered by the term 'epoxidised vegetable oil'. Epoxidised soybean oil (ESBO) is already on the list of acceptable previous cargoes. Because there are no toxicological data on other epoxidised vegetable oils, the Panel could not evaluate these epoxidised vegetable oils as previous cargoes.
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