Speaker
Description
The need for a circular economy, given the ever-expanding plastics industry, cannot be contested. Their impact on the environment is one of the biggest challenges of the Millennium. This situation birthed the EU funded H2020 MSCA project C-PlaNeT (Circular Plastics Network for Training). By partnership with eight universities 15 Early Stage Researchers (ESRs) are being trained to be a part of a new generation of scientists, engineers and policymakers who challenge and rethink the design, processing, use and reuse of plastics for the EU’s circular economy vision. C-PlaNeT has five core objectives with one of them being - ‘To decouple plastics from fossil resources’. As part of this objective comes the research topic – ‘Biobased plastics for a circular economy’.
Packaging is one of the biggest applications of plastics. Conventional plastics such as PE, PP, PET, etc., which dominate this sector, are straining the crude oil resources, resulting in a high carbon footprint. Product packaging is indispensable as it protects the product, achieves the product utility, and displays information. In this scenario, biobased plastics come into the picture.
Polyhydroxyalkanoates (PHAs) are a family of bioplastics which are both biobased and biodegradable. They are already making inroads into the packaging and the medical industry (drug delivery, stents etc.) Polyhydroxybutyrates are the first discovered and widely studied in the family of PHAs. Nevertheless, the aspect of mechanical recycling has not been fully realised due to their complex properties. Other known bioplastics like PLA, PBS, etc. can act as reference systems with which several key properties can be compared.
The same processing principles as conventional plastics apply to biobased plastics. The mechanical recyclability of bioplastics has to be checked quantitatively and fine-tuned. Our research aims to achieve this objective. Other applications of the recycled material like food packaging are envisaged.
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