Within the EC funded LIFE project VERMEER, a new software system was develop with the aim to identify risky FCM and suggest safer alternatives as remedy. This strategy allows to improve the environmental sustainability and the health of workers and consumers, providing forward-looking approaches in line with the green chemistry paradigm.
The software, freely available, is designed for the food contact materials (FCM) sector with the aim to identify risky substances and stimulate their replacement with safer alternatives.
The approach applied for the substitution takes into account three main parameters: the level of safety, the similarity algorithm and the identification of hazardous structural groups/alerts. To determine the level of safety, ToxEraser automatically verifies whether the substance of interest is included in two existing lists with safe chemicals, i.e. (i) Annex I of the EU Regulation 10/2011 containing the substances allowed for use as starting products in plastic FCM and (ii) the US-EPA Safer Chemical Ingredient List (SCIL). By including a read-across analysis, ToxEraser also identifies within each of these two lists substances that are structurally similar to the substance of interest. Finally, a series of structural alerts have been implemented in order to detect possible evidence of toxicity for different toxicological endpoints.
Software Features
Real case focus
One-shop system
Freely available
High-throughput system
Screen Shots
Input data
Download the results
Matching with the database
List of safer substituents
Download Instructions
ToxEraser FCM is a JAVA application that works on every operating system (Windows/Linux/Mac) supporting Java. Before proceeding, please check what version of Java is installed in your OS and if the JAVA_PATH environment variable is correctly set (for further details, please refer to Oracle documentation).
ToxEraser FCM works with Java 8 or OpenJDK Java 11+: depending on what version is installed or set in your operative system please follow the instructions below:
WINDOWS:
JAVA 8: Download and unpack the zipped file. To start the application, move to the application folder and run the file starter.bat
OPEN JDK JAVA 11 or greater: Download and unpack the zipped file. To start the application, you can just run the file ToxEraserGUI-0.8.4.jar. On most systems, it is enough to double-click it. If you are not able to directly run it, open a command line window (like Command Prompt or PowerShell on Windows systems) move to the application folder and type:
java -jar ToxEraserGUI-0.8.4.jar
LINUX/MAC OS
Make sure to install the latest LTS version of Java. First, in a shell update the apt package index with sudo apt update command.
Once the package index is updated install the default Java OpenJDK package with sudo apt install default-jdk
When the installation is complete, move to the application folder and execute sh starter.sh or bash starter.sh, or double click on starter.sh file
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