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Enhancing Packaging Sustainability with Natural Fiber Reinforced Biocomposites: An outlook into the future
Summary
This review examines natural fiber-reinforced biocomposites — made from agricultural waste and plant fibers — as sustainable alternatives to petroleum-based packaging materials, discussing manufacturing techniques, recent advances, and remaining challenges for wider adoption across food and consumer goods packaging.
Packaging across diverse sectors like food, FMCG products, pharmaceuticals, cosmetics, and electronics predominantly relies on petroleum-based materials. These petroleum-based non-renewable resources significantly impact the environment throughout their life cycle, emitting polluting gases, demanding energy-intensive manufacturing, and causing air, water, and land pollution during disposal. These problems can be minimized by using eco-friendly materials such as materials made from natural fibres, and agricultural waste that is biodegradable in nature. Natural fibre-reinforced biocomposite materials have a high potential to be used in sustainable packaging applications due to their lower environmental impact compared to petroleum-based materials. However, the use of biocomposites is very limited in the packaging sector and growing exponentially. Recently, agriculture waste fibres have been used for the development of various biocomposites-based packaging. In this paper, prior work has been analysed to identify the impact associated with petroleum-based packaging materials, advantages and potential of natural fiber-reinforced biocomposites in the packaging sector, manufacturing techniques, recent development, challenges, and prospects have been discussed.
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