As the world goes through different phases in the fight against climate change and towards more eco-friendly products, researchers have now developed a new technology that could set plastics aside for a long time: Chitosan food packaging, potentially the way to the future.
Researchers from the Basque Country in Spain have been recently working on a way to make packaging less dependent on hard to recycle materials like plastics, as they developing something called Chitosan food packaging, which is made from crustacean shells (like crabs) and could mean less dependency on environment unfriendly items like plastics.
According to Science Daily, scientists in the Spanish University of the Basque Country have been studying the newly created material for Chitosan food packaging, releasing the information in its regard in the scientific journal Postharvest Biology and Technology, in a paper entitled "Quality attributes of map packaged ready-to-eat baby carrots by using chitosan-based coatings."
As it is known, oil-based packaging products can seriously affect the environment, due to the fact that they could take between 100 and 400 years to degrade, making it hard to near impossible to fight against the current climate change; because of this, the shift toward more eco-friendly materials has been a major focus in these studies in the past few years, which explains the creation of the Chitosan food packaging.
As Science Codex reports, the Chitosan food packaging is actually made from the shells of different crustaceans such as prawns and king prawns. What makes this a good choice for food packaging, besides being biodegradable, is the fact that Chitosan naturally has antimicrobial properties and it can potentially reduce the microbial load of different foods - carrots, in the particular case of her investigation.
"Chitosan film is better than plastic film in terms of the environmental impact, in a range of categories, but that does not mean it does not pollute," said Itsaso Leceta, the leading investigator of the research, to website Eco-Business. "The manufacturing of chitosan, unlike the production of conventional plastics, has yet to be optimized."
