Abstract
The vast and ever-growing amount of agricultural and food wastes has become a major concern throughout the whole world. Therefore, strategies for their processing and value-added reuse are needed to enable a sustainable utilization of feedstock and reduce the environmental burden. By-products of potatoes arise in significant amounts in European countries and are consequently of high relevance, nevertheless they need to be valorized by leading to economic and environmental advantages. In this frame, potato wastes (leaves, discarded or sprouted potatoes, potato pulp, peels) will be considered as the main source for the extraction, by green methodologies involving enzymes and green solvents in a cascade approach, of main components (bioactive compounds, starch, cellulose, hemicellulose and lignin fractions) to be used in the preparation of polymeric blends and films for food packaging. Our ambition is to valorize the potentially rich components existing in the current low-value side streams from the potato industries into high-quality fractions to be further used in advanced applications in a key industrial sector. The proposal will consider the lab scale realization and characterization of polymeric blends, based on polyester synthetic fractions blended with plasticized starch (obtained from the potato pulp and peels) as main component. In order to improve the limited compatibility of the blend components, two options will be considered. Firstly, reactive extrusion of thermoplastic starch with biobased anhydrides will be tested and compared with the effectiveness of maleic anhydride grafted compounds. Secondly, lignin and purified sugar fractions will be added to the polyester to tune the interphase and modulate rigidity and flexibility of the blends. It is expected that plasticized purified hemicelluloses and lignin chemically modified with oligomeric polyester fractions will be able to tune the mechanical response of the blends. Cellulose and lignin from leaves and peels will be also isolated and manipulated at nanoscale level and considered as functional additives for the enhancement of mechanical, barrier and UV resistance behavior of the blends. Extracted bioactive compounds, both as free additives or chemically grafted to lignin and cellulose, will be also added to the formulations, to improve antimicrobial and antioxidant performance of the produced materials. Fractions having different purities will be obtained and used to prepare extruded starch based-blends, that will be further processed to give films for packaging applications. Assessment of basic morphological, thermal and mechanical properties will be preliminary considered to design specific functional requirements (reduced oxygen permeability, light barrier improvement, antioxidant/antibacterial effect, limited migration, controlled-release kinetics, tunable biodegradation in soil).
Dettagli del progetto
Responsabile scientifico: Michelina Soccio
Strutture Unibo coinvolte:
Dipartimento di Ingegneria Civile, Chimica, Ambientale e dei Materiali
Coordinatore:
ALMA MATER STUDIORUM - Università di Bologna(Italy)
Contributo totale Unibo: Euro (EUR) 47.757,00
Durata del progetto in mesi: 24
Data di inizio
28/09/2023
Data di fine:
28/02/2026
