Bioormocer achieves improved shelf-life and earns Ellen MacArthur circular award

10 Sep 2018 --- Fraunhofer Institute for Silicate Research has been awarded the “Circular Materials Challenge” prize for its development of bioormocers, a basic material which significantly improves on the barrier properties and shelf-life capabilities of pre-existing biopolymers. The prize was awarded to Dr Sabine Amberg-Schwab, a senior scientist at Fraunhofer, by the New Plastics Economy Initiative. The initiative was launched in 2016 by the Ellen MacArthur Foundation to promote new ways to counter the oceans plastics pollution.

PackagingInsights speaks to Dr Amberg-Schwab about the improvements the newly-developed material has made over existing biopolymers: “The barrier properties of biopolymers in protecting against moisture, oxygen and flavoring agents are not as good as they were supposed to be for most packaging requirements regarding food, cosmetics and pharmaceutics.”

“Biopolymers cannot guarantee the minimum shelf-life required for foods, so we upgrade these bioplastics by using our special biodegradable bioormocer coatings to improve their properties.”

“Bioormocer is a novel, biodegradable material class which combines inorganic-organic materials with specifically modified biopolymers,” she explains.

“Bioormocer can improve the properties of biopolymer packaging films as well as packaging containers so they can meet the requirements of conventional non-biogenic and non-biodegradable packaging materials. This means they could be used for a broad variety of packaging applications as mentioned above: food, pharmaceutics, cosmetics and other sensitive goods.”

“We work on the re-use of organic waste, for example, from food production to synthesize the basic raw materials for the bioormocers. We developed the basic material system; now we are looking for companies to pursue the idea of taking the next development steps jointly,” she adds.

The “Circular Materials Challenge” Prize
The prize is awarded by the Ellen MacArthur-launched New Plastics Initiative to five projects and together they share a one million dollar prize pot. Among the winning projects is the work of Dr Sabine Amberg-Schwab who developed the bioormocers.

The Fraunhofer ISC, located in Würzburg, Germany, is one of the leading R&D institutions for sustainable materials, technologies or products that help tackle the world’s foremost environmental challenges.

2015 saw a much-acclaimed report on ocean plastics pollution in Science magazine. Two years later, in November 2017, it was Dame Ellen MacArthur, creator of a foundation under her name, who used the same magazine to point to the fact that still more than eight million tons of plastic enter the oceans each year. And this figure is even likely to double within the next twenty years.

Today, only a small fraction of plastic waste is collected and recycled, and this does not only constitute a loss of valuable material but also poses a major threat to the environment. A new kind of compostable packaging based on renewable resources – so-called biopolymers – might offer a solution. Up until now this kind of packaging lacked in tightness against water vapor, oxygen and flavors and so remained unsuitable for food products.

“The urgent problem posed by plastic waste was always on our mind here at the Fraunhofer ISC and we were striving for better solutions,” says Dr Amberg-Schwab.

She and her team have longstanding expertise in the development of barrier films for food packaging designed to improve both the quality and shelf-life of packaged food. These barrier coatings based on special hybrid polymers, so-called ormocers, serve to protect against water vapor or any other gas and prevent outside substances from entering the packaged food.

The team of researchers has been working on compostable solutions for years in order to present a new generation of sustainable packaging materials based on biopolymers. “Our bioormocers eliminate the shortcomings of biopolymers and render them fit to serve as a reliable packaging material,” explains Amberg-Schwab. “They protect the packaged food and at the same time guarantee that the packaging material does not begin to degrade ahead of time.”

Professor Gerhard Sextl, Director of the Fraunhofer ISC, adds: “The sustainable use of resources is imperative to all our research. We are very happy that one of our teams was honored with this innovation prize, and it is rewarding to know that our work will contribute to reducing environmental pollution with packaging waste.”

Presently, Dr Amberg-Schwab and her team are joining forces with co-researchers of the Fraunhofer Project Group Materials Recycling and Resource Strategies IWKS to derive bioormocers from waste biomass and food processing by-products so that their production will not end up competing with food production or use up high-quality agricultural commodities.

The project “HyperBioCoat” brought together an unparalleled consortium of partnering companies and institutions on a European level and receives funding from the European Union.

By Joshua Poole