Publication

Abstract : Eco-friendly, renewable materials have been pushed in many applications to replace non-renewable resources in recent years. In the present work, a similar attempt was made to replace synthetic polymer-based food packaging films with films made out of waste-derived renewable materials. In this study, pectin (P) and sodium alginate (SA) polymers were blended with turmeric essential oil (O) to increase the functionality of the film. Turmeric essential oil was chosen over other plant based essential oils due to its potential antioxidant, antifungal and broad-spectrum antimicrobial activity. Calcium ions were used to crosslink the films with glycerol as the plasticizer in order to increase their potential usefulness. The prepared films were characterised to ascertain their performance for practical applications. Tensile strength, tear resistance, percent elongation, water contact angle, thermal stability, degree of crystallinity and FTIR analysis were undertaken to evaluate the suitability of the prepared films for intended usage. The elongation at break for P/SA film was 79.96% and that of P/SA/O film was 91.08%. Also, the ultimate modulus of P/SA film was 1.58 MPa and that of P/SA/O film was 9.49 MPa. So, it was found that the P/SA/O films have higher modulus than that of neat blend films, which indicates that oil addition did not have any negative impact on the strength of the film. The biodegradation investigations on prepared films showed that films will break down under ambient conditions over a notable period of time, indicating that they would be a better option as an environmentally benign food packaging and edible coating material. The uniqueness is in the combination of sustainable polymers selected to produce the stable antimicrobial films with essential oil extracted from the matured leaves of the plant. Most of the studies focus on use of essential oil extracted from rhizome, but in the present study, the essential oil extracted from the waste source (matured leaf) is used. Henceforth it is a value addition to the waste.