Food waste is a huge problem, where each person in the Eu uses about 400 pounds of food each year, and they throw that away. It’s a waste, and when you’re trying to reduce hunger in a world that’s striving for this, it’s imperative to make sure that you have ways to minimize food waste. Plastic of course, helps to minimize waste and extend the shelf life due to how easy it is to use, the versatility and lightness, and of course, the strength and handling of this. However, you need to have recycled packaging, since that’s what the EU wants to implement. Not only that, but customers also want alternatives of course to help with making sure that packaging is much more sustainable. But there is a new solution, and that is active packaging, and the solution is to help with food waste, in order to create innovative and efficient production of bioplastic, in order to create and package food that is renewable and also recyclable, in order to replace the conventional fossil fuels. This includes PHA and PGA, which were used to create bio-based types of packaging and is used to package meats, snacks, and cereals too.
The Active Coatings
But one of their biggest innovations was the bacteriophage-based coatings that reduce the salmonella proliferation in chicken samples that were packed in atmospheres which were modified. The project used active coatings, and this did address the problems that were faced with the barriers and their properties. In order to crate and protect food, packaging is more complex and multilayer, and the structures are oftentimes difficult or costly when it comes to recycling. The packaging systems that are converted or composted do create promising alternatives on the market and is a good one for packaging. This type of packaging does need to be recyclable, and also create barrier properties that protect food that’s packaged. Current packaging is a complex structure that’s made from sources that are not renewable, creating protective functions, but it’s too difficult or to o expensive in order to recycle, and the goal is to replace the packaging with alternatives as well.
High-Performance Packaging
In a few years, this project has the goal of creating coatings which are active on the packaging films, and from there, it helps to extend to use the bacteriophage organisms in order to offer more shelf life to products and also reduce the proliferation of salmonella in chicken in this modified environment. Through the use of low-quality flower, which is a byproduct otherwise wasted, it’s ten manufactured within these trays and from there, creating m more efficient production process and PGA plastic, which is biodegradable, and an excellent water barrier in terms of properties, giving it more promising applications for the packaging of the food.
But before this point, the solution used to be too expensive, and it had to be replaced by fossil fuels. But this project has ended in October of 2020, and it does validate the new packaging structures comparing the performance to the metallized packaging for the non-biological applications that are currently used in this. For now, whether or not they will put this on the market yet is really up tot how the tests and what they plan to do with this next. But more tests are being carried out in order to test to see what the shelf life and the biodegradability of those conventional packaging has currently, so we may not only see this more in the future, but we also may start to find more sustainable packaging options too.
No comments:
Post a Comment