Sustainable compostable packaging formed from all natural materials

Industrialisation of manufacturing has dramatically reduced the cost of products for consumers. An unfortunate side effect is the throw-away society, a linear economy in which we "take-make-dispose". Over the next decade a billion tonnes of oil-based plastic will be dumped into landfill and seep into our oceans, much from packaging.

This plastic waste not only damages our environment, but also enters our food chain. A new approach is needed, a circular economy in which we eliminate waste and reliance on finite resources. This project will develop a new range of packaging materials, coated films that are biodegradable, formed from sustainable sources.

These can then replace current conventional fossil-fuel based packaging. We need an economy built on carbohydrates not hydrocarbons; plant biopolymers are an inexhaustible renewable resource of molecules from which we can make materials, chemicals, and energy. This interdisciplinary project brings together academia with industry, Futamura Chemicals UK Ltd, to create a next generation of sustainable, all-natural, compostable packaging.

This project has the potential to radically change how packaging is produced in the UK and then across the world. It will help deliver cleaner growth by transforming waste into packaging, reducing our reliance on fossil fuels, and as the materials here produced are compostable, will reduce plastic waste entering the environment. The challenge in this project is to form cellulosic films with tailored film barrier properties from natural waste sources.

We have identified tomato leaf and orange peel as these are "non-competitive waste streams", with no natural home that are currently incinerated or sent to landfill. The films will need the required mechanical properties, optical properties, barrier properties and compostability.

This project will: quantify and understand the properties of the films produced from tomato leaf by Futamura; determine the effect of coating these films with orange peel derived formulations on barrier and mechanical properties; understand the relationship between film microscopic properties (composition / orientation / structure) and the resultant film macroscopic properties; and assess the compostability of the films (soil structure, chemicals released).