The Next Generation of Sustainable Food Packaging to Preserve Our Environment in a Circular Economy Context

Abstract

Packaging is an essential element of response to address key challenges of sustainable food consumption on the international scene, which is clearly about minimizing the environmental footprint of packed food. An innovative sustainable packaging aims to address food waste and loss reduction by preserving food quality, as well as food safety issues by preventing food-borne diseases and food chemical contamination. Moreover, it must address the long-term crucial issue of environmentally persistent plastic waste accumulation as well as the saving of oil and food material resources. This paper reviews the major challenges that food packaging must tackle in the near future in order to enter the virtuous loop of circular bio-economy. Some solutions are proposed to address pressing international stakes in terms of food and plastic waste reduction and end-of-life issues of persistent materials. Among potential solutions, production of microbial biodegradable polymers from agro-food waste residues seems a promising route to create an innovative, more resilient, and productive waste-based food packaging economy by decoupling the food packaging industry from fossil feed stocks and permitting nutrients to return to the soil. To respond to the lack of tools and approach to properly design and adapt food packaging to food needs, mathematical simulation, based on modeling of mass transfer and reactions into food/packaging systems are promising tools. The next generation of such modeling and tools should help the food packaging sector to validate usage benefit of new packaging solutions and chose, in a fair and transparent way, the best packaging solution to contribute to the overall decrease of food losses and persistent plastic accumulation.

Torrefaction of Coffee Husk Flour for the Development of Injection-Molded Green Composite Pieces of Polylactide with High Sustainability

“…Valorization of food processing by-products and agricultural waste is acquiring increasing importance due to the high interest in the development of novel sustainable materials as part of the Circular Bioeconomy framework [1,2]. Agro-food wastes, such as flax fibers [3,4], rice husk [5], jute fibers [6,7], almond husk [8,9], walnut husk [10], orange peel [11], coconut fibers [12] or sisal fibers [13], represent examples of recently explored fillers to be incorporated into biopolymer matrices.…”

Sustainable Food Packaging: Materials and Waste Management Solutions

“…Some existing food packaging is innovative and sustainable by its resources and is biobased, some is innovative and sustainable by its end of life and is biodegradable or compostable. However, full and fair assessment of the overall environmental benefits needs to be done (Guillard et al, 2018). Unquestionably, innovative biobased packaging can become a great alternative for traditional conventional plastic packaging.…”

“…Plastic packaging waste raises the biggest concerns on environmental impact, so far as 40% of disposable (single use) or very short usage food packaging ends up in a way which has a negative environmental impact, i.e., landfilling. This inefficient end-oflife scenario of packaging corresponds to 9 million tons of plastic accumulated in soils decreasing soil and whole food chain quality (Guillard et al, 2018). As much as 32% leak out of collecting and sorting systems and finally end in the soil and ocean as well.…”

Emerging strategies for the development of food industries

“…The use of biodegradable packaging allows the diffusion of bioactive components, through encapsulation of the bioactive ingredients in the packaging material. These materials can also be used as biodegradable materials with enzymatic activity with the ability to transform the food components in order to provide food quality, reduce food waste and increase its shelf life [69,70]. The advancement in the use of bioactive components in packaging films is the addition of additives.…”