bioplastic

The food distribution of (deep) refrigerated goods is a steadily growing market segment that deals with sustainability in particular. Due to the high efficiency of the CEP service providers, a shipment as such is not necessarily worse than a shopping trip by car over several kilometers in town. A concrete approach to improve ecological sustainability in food delivery is the substitution of existing PE plastic bags filled with dry ice. The bags help to keep the dry ice together and protect the customer from burns. The following article analyzes ecological aspects of food shipment and conveys an understanding of current development concerning biodegradable plastic films. Due to special material properties of bio-based plastic films, the manufacturability of dry ice bags was investigated in a series of experiments. Dry ice bags were manufactured by means of the very precisely adjustable joining technology ultrasonic welding. Subsequent, load capacity of the dry ice bags was examined.

100 years ago the plastic era began with the first industrial production of plastic from petroleum. The polluting degradation of common plastic takes hundreds of years. Therefore, so-called bioplastic are becoming more popular in society. However, not every bioplastic is biodegradable or produced from renewable resources. This article focuses on the production of microbial produced polyesters with comparable properties to polyethylene, which is completely biodegradable in common habitats and can by synthesized from biogenic feedstocks.