Biodegradability is one of the key parts of the urgent need to reduce waste and develop sustainable economies and industries, and ‘Biobottle’ may be part of the answer.
5 countries have participated in a programme to create biodegradable containers for the dairy industry. Co-ordinated by the Valencian technological institute Aimplas, the German Company VLB, Belgium’s OWS, Italy’s CNR, Portugal’s VIZELPAS and ESPAÇOPLAS, and Valencia’s ALMUPLAS (Almussafes) and ALJUAN (Ibi) have all made their contributions to the masssive reduction of wastage.
The Project seeks to develop biodegradable and transparent plastics from PLA compounds with high impact resistance and low migration, developing new biopolymers based on poly(lactic acid) PLA, with higher properties than standard grades on the market, mainly regarding impact resistance properties but maintaining the transparency, temperature resistance and processability.
The packages for this kind of products are currently manufactured from polyethylene, which, although it is easily recyclable, still ends its shelf life mostly in landfills.
The aim of the project was that the new biodegradable packages manufactured with the biopolymers developed within the project complied with the mechanical and thermal aspects required for these applications, as well as passing microbiological tests without affecting the product’s organoleptic properties. The results are monolayer bottles and caps and multilayer bags able to resist temperatures up to 95ºC.
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