Marta Pineiro
University of Coimbra, Portugal
Title: Development of a cellulose based biodegradable material for packaging
Biography
Biography: Marta Pineiro
Abstract
About 38% of the 407 millions tons of plastics produced worldwide is used in the packaging industry in a market dominated by the polyolefins (PP,LDPE,HDPE). This means that, only by this activity, 154 millions tons of waste are generated and a huge part of this will be lost from any recycling circuit finishing their brief lives in landfills[1]. The introduction of biodegradable materials in packaging industry will reduce the pressure over the deposition in landfills but the decomposition must be in a way that safe products are generate during the process of environment friendly biodegradation to carbon dioxide [2].The non-edible nature of cellulose, its abundance as available material in the form of wood or agriculture residues and its renewable and biodegradable characteristics makes this natural polymer an interesting material to be used as environmental friendly packaging materials.[3] However, cellulose lacks thermoplasticity which means that it must be blended with other polymeric materials in order to get possible to be workable in packaging industry. Polyesters are generally biodegradable polymers due to the reversibility of the ester bond by hydrolysis. The manipulation of the structure could turn the mechanical properties of the polyesters more similar to polyolefins and in a future replace them as a main thermoplastic source. Actually polyesters are more expensive than polyolefins but the introduction of low cost fillers could reduce costs and improve mechanical properties [4].
In this work we present the results of the combination of hydrolysed pulp cellulose with Bioflex® which a mixture of two biodegradable polyesters polylactic acid (PLA) and polybutylenesuccinate (PBS). The mechanical behaviour of composite samples with different amounts of cellulose will be discussed.