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Pilar Villanueva

Pilar Villanueva

AIMPLAS, Spain

Title: Biodegradable and compostable materials for packaging applications

Biography

Biography: Pilar Villanueva

Abstract

Biodegradable plastic materials can be considered as the main breakthrough of the last two decades in plastics technology. Its use has broaden to many applications as its properties have been improved to meet more demanding requirements. Biodegradable materials are being established as an alternative to conventional thermoplastic materials in a number of applications such as packaging, biomedical, agriculture, etc. However, most of the biodegradable plastics need physical and/or chemical modifications to achieve the requirements for each case of study. Related to this, AIMPLAS is working in different European projects where new materials have been developed suitable to obtain biodegradable packaging by extrusion technologies directly applicable to conventional industrial processes. Two examples are BIOBOTTLE and BIO4MAP projects. BIOBOTTLE project. New biodegradable bottles and pouches have been developed for packaging different types of dairy products (fresh milk, pasteurized mild and UHT dairy products), maintaining their shelf life in comparison with traditional packages. The packages developed into the project, fulfil the different characteristics based on thermal, mechanical, microbiological and organoleptic properties depending on the type of dairy product. One of the main challenges of this project was to fulfil the thermal properties to support the sterilization and pasteurization conditions. BIO4MAP project. The aim of this project has been to develop innovative fully biodegradable and recyclable, multilayer, flexible and transparent structures for packaging fresh pasta and different types of cheese that requires customized modified atmosphere (MAP). Different biodegradable thermoplastic materials have been combined, mainly polylactic acid (PLA) and polyvinyl alcohol (PVOH). Packages have been obtained by coextrusion and thermoforming technologies. With the aim of increasing the barrier against moisture, a biodegradable coating based on natural waxes has been applied to the inner layer of the multilayer structure.