Naturally sourced, sustainable and self healing flexible barrier packaging

Plastic packaging and the waste associated with it is a well-known and painful part of modern life. However, it is the recycling, recovery, and end-of-life that we all hate, not the added convenience, hygiene, and shelf-life of products. Certain products just could not be sold without packaging, as oxygen and humidity would spoil and rot the food or let coffee beans lose all their aroma. These are precisely the packaging materials that can't be recycled and wind up in landfill or incinerators.

These packaging materials, which you have likely handled today, are those with metal linings and thin films of aluminium. This metal layer blocks and seals in all the flavour and air, but equally, makes recycling and separating the metal from the plastic nearly impossible -- so actually plastic is not the only villain here...

Our project aims to kick aluminium out of packaging films and turn to nature for a solution. Nanocellulose is what we call the plant extract we use -- the purest form of plant matter and itself evolved over billions of years to be stronger than steel and completely impervious to air. By making thin films of this nanocellulose (and a little magically chemistry from our University of Cambridge collaborators), we can create layers that serve the function of metal coatings but remain totally biodegradable and recyclable. Nanocellulose once crushed and mixed back into a recycled plastic will not destroy it's properties, as metal would, but in fact strengthen the recycled materials. By using nanocellulose, we can consider our packaging materials are "monopolymer" or single plastic. This is the key to recycling as separating is the major cost and problem with plastics recycling.

We propose a focused product development to move our technology from the lab into the market by piloting a new flexible film that can seal in flavour, extend shelf-lives, and all of this without the need for mixing metals into our plastic. While we wait for bioplastics and the future of polymer science to find a solution, we will start right now by ensuring as much of our packaging is as easily recycled as possible.