Developing innovative green packaging materials

Food and drink packaging (\>$300Bn/year global market) relies on plastics and a variety of chemicals now considered hazardous to health and dangerous to the environment. These chemicals usually impart barrier properties, non-stick surfaces, flame retardancy and antimicrobial activities which are required for food/drink packaging. New regulations are being introduced globally to limit/restrict use of these chemicals, meaning that new biosafe barriers for food/drink packaging need to be found, which will also support consumer demand for safe and environmentally friendly materials.

This project will develop new biodegradable and biosafe materials with oil/water resistant surfaces, and flame retardant and antimicrobial properties which can be deployed to the food/drink packaging sector. Our industry partners will develop low energy environmentally friendly enzymatic processes to break down waste potato and sugar beet to extract nanocelluloses. Nanocelluloses have remarkable tensile strength, flexibility and absorbancy/barrier properties and small quantities added to paper mixes greatly improves strength and robustness. These characterised nanocelluloses produced by industry partners will have functional groups attached to them using non-hazardous chemicals and proteins, which will impart oil/water resistance, antimicrobial activities and fire retardant properties. ISO accredited analytical approaches will confirm that these functional groups have been suitably integrated into the nanocelluloses. The oil/water resistance and flame retardancy of the novel materials will be assessed, as will their antiviral and antibacterial activities. Nanocelluloses with suitable functionality will be provided to partners for incorporation into paper fibres in different ratios and dried down or applied as a coating to paper. These will be physically and chemically characterised by partners to confirm the presence of functional groups. Partners will assess the composite materials tensile strength, oil/water resistance, water vapour transmission rate, gas barrier properties, flammability, antimicrobial activities and biodegradability in soil. Materials that are the most promising will be earmarked for scaled up production assessment and also for life cycle analysis which will indicate economic and environmental costs and energy burdens of producing these materials. All project partners will protect IP prior to discussing these products with their existing customers, who are global leaders in the food/packaging industry. Further market analysis will be carried out to potentially roll out the technologies to other market sectors.