Abstract
Green economy, also referred to as biobased economy,
utilizes biomass derived raw materials for high-volume
applications, such as packaging. Barrier properties are
extremely important for biobased food packaging materials
as gas, water vapor, grease, aroma and UV-transmission
through packaging reduce the quality of food resulting
shorter shelf-lives, increased costs and eventually more
waste. Biopolymers, such as cellulose, pectin, xylan,
starch or chitosan can be used as coating raw materials
for paper&board and biobased films and exploited as safe
and environmentally sustainable alternatives for
synthetic barrier packaging materials. For example,
cellulose nanofibrils (CNF) is one of the most promising
innovations for forest sector especially due to its
excellent barrier properties. Biopolymers can be further
reinforced with inorganic nanoplatelets such as
montmorillonite based nanoclays. Due to their high aspect
ratios of up to 1000, these nanolayered silicates have
been widely studied as regards the barrier properties.
High-barrier requirements can be reached with additional
surface treatment technologies such as sol-gel, ALD or
plasma-deposited thin coatings. By plasma deposition the
precursors can be chemically grafted on film surface by
covalent bonding. Atmospheric plasma activation is also a
versatile way to enable the use of sol-gel coatings with
polymeric packaging materials. Alternatively, an Al2O3
coating layer grown using the ALD technique could provide
an answer to the need for high-quality barrier films. ALD
is a surface-controlled, layer-by-layer, thin-film
deposition technique based on self-limiting gas-solid
reactions. Current trends in the packaging industry are
towards lighter weight materials for reduction of raw
material use, transportation costs, and minimizing the
amount of waste. Interest in sustainable materials
combined with barrier improving fillers will continue to
growth. As single layer biopolymer films rarely have
competitive edge against synthetic films, the combination
of individual layers to multilayer structures is
necessary. By multilayer structures the barrier
properties of biobased materials may be dramatically
improved.
Original language | English |
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Publication status | Published - 2014 |
Event | Biobased materials for industrial coatings - Düsseldorf, Germany Duration: 8 Dec 2014 → 9 Dec 2014 |
Conference
Conference | Biobased materials for industrial coatings |
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Country/Territory | Germany |
City | Düsseldorf |
Period | 8/12/14 → 9/12/14 |