King's College London

 

Drs Francisco Martin-Martinez and Micaela Matta are part of a new €3.7million four-year project, SATISPHACTION, to develop high-quality biodegradable food packaging made from a decomposable polymer called PHA.

By providing a robust and scalable alternative to plastic food packaging made from fossil fuels, the nine-institute consortium hopes to create a circular economy that minimises the extraction and use of non-renewables.

Conventional plastics are one of the main environmental challenges today due to their dependence on fossil fuels and the danger their pollution poses to the natural world. Every year the world produces over 460 million tonnes of plastic, 90% of which pollutes the environment. Food packaging is a major part of this issue as they are highly prevalent in the market and are difficult to recycle through normal methods.

PHAs, or polyhydroxyalcanoates, provide a credible alternative to these plastics as their raw materials are naturally produced by bacteria, is suitable for food contact and are completely biodegradable.

However, currently these materials are difficult to work with and produce cheaply, leading companies to blend them with other bioplastics that limit PHAs biodegradability and capacity to be recycled.

To help solve this, Drs Martin-Martinez and Matta will use computational chemistry, AI, and modelling techniques to simulate and design PHA polymers with bespoke properties. By knitting together individual chains of hydrocarbons with key attributes such as decomposability and stability, they hope to create credible polymer plastic candidates that are both biodegradable and can be produced at scale.

The King’s researchers will also play a role in modelling how to create efficient new recycling methods for this new plastic, both chemically and using enzymes, to break it down into its raw components to be made into packaging once again. By doing so, the AINIA research centre led consortium hope to cut the cost of the plastic’s production and its environmental impact through its life cycle.

Dr Martin-Martinez’s, King’s main contributor to the consortium, said “The scale and importance of improving plastics recyclability cannot be overstated. Only 9% of the millions of tonnes of plastic produced in the world is recycled, and plastic packaging accounts for around 36% of total output, much of it for food. Creating a plastic that could be used for packaging that is fully recyclable, and biodegradable would be a major step in a more sustainable plastics economy."

Following the design of the prototype polymers, industry partner Polykey will produce them and feedback on the initial designs and ascertain which ones could be scaled up to a full PHA solution – ultimately aiming to replace conventional plastic food packaging in Europe. Also in collaboration with King’s scientists, partners in AINIA and Centro de Investigaciones Biológicas Margarita Salas will them explore avenues to break down the polymers to their initial building blocks.

When the initial blueprints for PHA have been created, the team also hope to train a machine learning algorithm, a type of AI, to accelerate the design of new PHAs and to predict their properties. This would help provide potential solutions far quicker, cutting the time of deployment from lab-based concept, to supermarket shelf in the future.

Alongside other consortium partners across academia and industry, AINIA, Centro de Investigaciones Biológicas Margarita Salas, Faculdade de Ciências e Tecnologia da Universidade NOVA de Lisboa, NAITEC Centro Tecnológico de Movilidad y Mecatrónica, POLYKEY, Normec OWS, and Packaging Cluster, the group will be releasing research papers announcing their results throughout the project’s lifecycle.