Advanced materials applications

There's a dramatic move underway to develop plastics from plant-based feedstocks. These industrial designer feedstocks could become the most important renewable source for starch, fibres and monomers for the 21st century chemical and polymer manufacturing and energy production industries. Few crops have comparable immediate or long-term potential to meet these needs as triticale.

Uses of plant-based polymers

The new interest in making plastics with renewable resources results from a global environmental awareness and from the depletion of fossil fuels. In these perspectives, vegetable raw materials, mainly polymers, show attractive properties with great interest to the plastic industry. These include biodegradability, biocompatibility, selective permeability or variability in physico-mechanical properties. These properties have led to new applications in various fields, specifically in the packaging, agricultural, textile, pharmaceutical, electronic and medical domains.

With the development of various biodegradable plastics with differing structures, properties and degradation behaviours, a range of potentially suitable application areas are emerging. For example, starch-based polymers may be suitable in agricultural and horticultural applications where no inorganic residues can result. Polymers with prodegradant additives, which maintain their structural integrity until they undergo composting, may be suitable for food waste bags.

Biodegradable plastics are well placed to replace conventional plastics in low-weight, miscellaneous packaging applications that are not currently mechanically recycled. For example, certain streams of packaging such as take-away food containers, thermoformed biscuit trays and plastic food wrap are not collected and sorted for mechanical recycling at present and therefore may lend themselves well to substitution by biodegradable plastics that can be bioassimilated in compost. Furthermore, their high level of food residues enables such products to be composted.