The Spanish National Research Council (CSIC), an agency attached to the Ministry of Science, Innovation and Universities, is taking part in a new European project aimed at developing plastics based on strawberry waste using sustainable technologies. The initiative will also produce an antioxidant and antibacterial pad designed to prevent the formation of ethylene, a gas that accelerates strawberry spoilage.
With contributions from CSIC through the Institute of Materials Science (ICMM) and the Institute of Catalysis and Petrochemistry (ICP), the project has secured total funding of €4 million under the Pathfinder Challenges programme, which supports research with high impact potential.
“Faced with the challenge of creating bio-based food packaging, our proposal is to develop packaging from highly perishable fruit such as strawberries,” explains Eva Maya, researcher at ICMM-CSIC and CSIC’s project coordinator. “The teams will simulate an ecosystem in which everything is used: we start with strawberry waste to create raw materials, from which we will produce the molecules that make up the packaging,” she adds.
The packaging will be developed for fruit once it reaches the retail stage, but the project will also produce the pads used inside strawberry packs, as well as mulching plastic applied during cultivation. In addition, pharmaceutical packaging will be manufactured, replacing aluminium with this new bio-based material.
The project, titled ECOSYSTEM, will also focus on strategies for reusing the bio-packaging once it has been used. “We will study recycling, biodegradation and reuse systems,” says Maya. Throughout the project, three innovative and sustainable technologies will be applied: biorefinery, mechanochemistry and white biotechnology.
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The ICP will be responsible for the biorefinery component, receiving strawberry waste and extracting the raw materials cellulose, lignin and furfural. “We are closing the loop of the circular economy: we will use all strawberry crop residues containing biomass and separate them into these three components, which will then be used by the rest of the partners,” explains Martín Alonso, CSIC researcher at the ICP.
In a second stage, part of these raw materials will be transferred to the ICMM, where molecules will be created through mechanochemistry. “This is a new technology that uses neither heat nor solvents, meaning much lower energy consumption and very fast processing,” Maya explains. These molecules will then be used to manufacture the new packaging materials.
At the ICMM, researchers will also develop a new type of pad for strawberry packaging. Current pads generally only absorb moisture, but the new solution will be antioxidant, antibacterial and capable of preventing ethylene production—the gas released by fruit during ripening that causes strawberries to deteriorate rapidly.
In addition, the ICMM will revisit the end-of-life stage of the materials. “We plan to transform used packaging residues into catalysts, substances capable of converting one material into another. Depending on the nature of the catalyst, we will assess which reactions they can be applied to,” Maya explains.
The project is led by the Spanish foundation Funditec and involves partners from Spain (CSIC, the Plastics Technology Institute of Valencia – AIMPLAS, and the company Kneia), Italy (Università degli Studi di Ferrara and Agricola2000), Switzerland (TEMAS Solutions), Denmark (Danish Technological Institute) and Greece (Mountain Berries).
