Brazilian researchers have become the latest to develop a form of plastic from edible vegetable crops. The Brazilian Agricultural Research Corporation: Embrapa Instrumentation made edible plastic films from foods including spinach and tomatoes.
“We can use the waste food industry to manufacture the material. This ensures two features of sustainability: the use of food waste and replacing synthetic packaging that would be discarded,” said coordinating scientist, Luiz Henrique Capparelli Mattoso.
The edible plastic is made of dehydrated food mixed with a nanomaterial which sets the resulting material. “The greatest challenge of this research was to find the ideal formulation, the recipe of ingredients and proportions so that the material had the features we needed,” added materials engineer José Manoel Marconcini.
Last year a team of researchers from the Italian Institute of Technology in Genoa have created a new type of bioplastic from vegetable wastes including spinach.