Environmental and societal awareness on the importance of sustainability and of bio-economy, are generating sensibility for a sustainable development of consumables. Additionally there is a growing responsibility versus the value and resources wasted due to food loss. It is estimated that about one third of all the food globally produced is wasted every year, generating 1.3 billion tonnes of residues, this occurs throughout the whole food value chain from farmers to consumers. The European Strategy for Bioeconomy features actions for ensuring food security, managing natural resources, reducing dependence on non-renewable resources, mitigating and adapting to climate change, creating jobs and maintaining European competitiveness. ECOFUNCO aims to bring several benefits to the primary production including food loss reduction, natural resources preservation, fossil feedstock replacement, by-product valorisation and environmental impact reduction.
The objective of project ECOFUNCO is to select, extract-functionalise molecules (proteins, polysaccharides, cutin) from highly available, low valorised biomass such as tomato, legumes, sunflower etc for the development of new bio-based coating materials to be applied on two different substrates (cellulosic and plastic based), with improved performances compared to currently available products and at the same time with more sustainable end of life options. These has been used to manufacture the products (biobased coatings for cellulose and plastics) that in the second half of the project will be validated in their final applications. The performances of the final products have been validated and the overall environmental impact of the entire value chain were evaluated according to the LCA standard.
The biomass derived molecules addressed in the project such as proteins for gas barrier, chitosan-chitin for anti-microbial activity, and cutin for barrier to water, were successfully extracted-produced from agro-food biomass. The products developed in the project are in particular: mcl-PHA, antimicrobial-antioxidant coatings based on chitin nanofibrills, and/or chitosan, Microbial Cellulose for cellulose tissues (personal care), paper and cardboard (packaging for fresh products like pasta, tableware), woven and nonwoven (sanitary), plastic substrates (bio-polyesters) for active packaging. Cutin based formulations for coatings water repellent (paper cups, service paper etc.), water vapour barrier (packaging) and protective properties (non-food packaging). Protein- based barrier adhesive for multilayer food packaging (bio polyesters based), with sustainable end of life options (composting, recyclability).
