On April 14, 2025, the Nordic Council of Ministers published the report “Non-target and suspect screening of articles, chemical products and recycled materials.” The review aims to provide an overview of studies that have used non-target screening (NTS) or suspect screening (SS) to identify substances in articles, chemical products, and recycled materials made of plastic, wood, elastomers, paper/paperboard, textiles, and other substances. This work provides information as to whether currently available methods can efficiently identify relevant substances for regulatory actions.
According to the report, current chemical analysis mostly uses methods that target specific compounds of known chemical structures. This approach allows for quantification, but only for a small number of compounds. In contrast, NTS and SS allow for more comprehensive screening of chemicals present in a product or sample, including potentially hazardous ones. With NTS, formerly unknown contaminants can be identified. SS, a subcategory of NTS, screens for a broad list of chemicals of concern that are assumed to be present. Despite their potential to expand chemical screening, whether these methods are sufficiently reliable is unclear and has not been thoroughly evaluated.
In its literature review, the research team identified 76 documents, 38 of which were selected for further review based on their relevance and data availability. Of these studies, 26 screened products directly, 8 looked for chemical migrants from products, and 4 did both. Over half of the included studies were published in the last two years, suggesting that NTS/SS is a relatively recent, but fast-growing field. Of the 38 studies, 34 identified chemicals at high confidence levels, accounting for 1,700 of the 3,000 unique chemical entries extracted from the included studies. Of these 34 studies, 19 used NTS, 11 used SS, and 4 used both methods. For the 1,700 substances that were confidently identified, 28 are restricted under REACH, 4 are regulated as persistent organic pollutants (POPs), and 6 are proposed POPs. A further 62 of the identified chemicals have been prioritized as persistent, mobile, and toxic (PMT) and very persistent and very mobile (vPvM).
According to the authors, the current challenges in using NTS and SS for chemical regulation include the need for time-intensive data curation and the lack of a standardized workflow, making the interpretation, evaluation, and comparison of data challenging. Both false positives and false negatives also remain a significant concern, especially in regulatory applications. Based on their findings, the report authors recommend using NTS and SS only for early warning purposes when it comes to regulation due to their current limitations. Introducing standardized workflows and enhancing quality assurance/quality control measures would improve the potential for these approaches to effectively identify regulatory-relevant substances in products and materials.
Reference
Nordic Council of Ministers (April 14, 2025) “Non-target and suspect screening of articles, chemical products and recycled materials.”
