Sustainable bioplastics (PHAs) from agroindustrial residues to close the packaging loop – LOOP4PACK

To address the overwhelming negative environmental issues of plastic packaging and to enter A circular economy, it is urgent and crucial to lessen the negative burden of packaging resources (renewable without competition for food resources vs. oil-based) and packaging waste (fully biodegradable vs. accumulated). Furthermore, despite extremely dynamic researches and developments on biobased and biodegradable materials, commercially available bio-packaging does not yet properly meet the huge market and society demands. Currently marketed bio-polymers are either made from food resources, or not fully biodegradable in natural conditions. Among them, PHAs (PolyHydroxyAlkanoates) are the more promising due to their inherent full biodegradability and to their great diversity (more than 150 monomers) from which we can obtain tailored polymers that cover a wide range of applications. However the few PHAs available today on market are rigid and brittle limiting performance; Morover their cost is still high (3-15 times higher than conventional polymers like PE and PP). More importantly their environmental impact should be lessen since PHAs synthesis is done using noble food resources and high amounts of solvents are used for their recovery and purification. In this context, the purpose of the project LOOP4PACK is to contribute to the development of a French sustainable valorization chain of agro-industrial residues leading to microbial engineered polymers (PHAs) for flexible packaging for food applications.
The LOOP4PACK research will us McCain as a case study and will be conducted by the consortium partners (players from diverse and complementary backgrounds all along the value chain) : two laboratories (IATE & LISBP), a technology resource center (CRITT-Bio-Industry), a large company (McCain) and a competitiveness cluster (MATIKEM).
LOOP4PACK takes into account different steps of the process which influence structure and properties of PHAs (PHAs synthesis, recovery and formulation), while limiting production costs and environmental impacts.
LOOP4PACK will therefore extend and control PHAs functions either by optimizing biosynthesis to obtain (P(3HB-co-3HV) with high 3HV content (=25%) and mcl-PHAs;and at the formulation level, PHAs will be mixed with fully biodegradable and biobased nucleating agents and/or fillers to take benefit of composite structures.