Materials and technologies - March 2019

28 March 2019

Number of EU patents for packaging material increased by 180 since 2017
The European Patent Office (EPO) has announced that they received over 174,000 European patent applications in 2018, an increase of 4.6% and an all-time high. You can read more in the online EPO Annual Report 2018. The European patent register holds 2,184 patents with the search term ‘packaging material’ (search done by NVC on 15 March 2019). This is an increase of 180 in a years’ time. On 15 March 2018 NVC did the same search and that resulted in 2,004 patents.

New anti-counterfeiting device
Researchers from Singapore University of Technology and Design (SUTD) have developed a new anti-counterfeiting device called “holographic color prints.” SUTD’s new optical device looks like a typical color print when under ambient white light, however, under laser illumination (red, green, or blue) it projects up to three different images. An article (6.56 MB) about the research is published in Nature Communications.

Packaging raspberries in MAP
Raspberries are one of the world’s most fragile fruits. The hollow structure of the berries means they need to be handled with care. Researchers at the Tasmanian Institute of Agriculture (TIA) are testing the quality of the berries after being stored for 2 weeks in different packaging and with different atmospheric conditions. They are working on determining the most beneficial atmospheric composition in the packaging.

Packaging made from fruit waste and packaging made from lignin
For her doctorate at the University of Borås, Veronika Bátori studied making disposable products or bioplastic films from fruit waste. In the thesis (4.77 MB) “Fruit wastes to biomaterials: Development of biofilms and 3D objects in a circular economy system”, she shows how she studied this in two types of wastes from apples and oranges. She sees potential in creating disposables like, for example, mugs or plates when it comes to 3D objects. When it comes to plastic films, these can be used for food packaging or waste bags for food waste.
Researchers at the University of Wisconsin–Madison have developed a method for employing the soil bacteria N. aromaticivorans to turn lignin into a more valuable commodity. Lignin is an abundant source — other than petroleum — of aromatic compounds, but the large and complex lignin molecule is notoriously hard to efficiently break into useful constituent pieces. In the course of its digestion process, the microbe turns those aromatic compounds into PDC. Bioengineers in Japan have used PDC to make a variety of materials that would be useful for consumer products. An article (1.60 MB) about the research is published in Green Chemistry.

Different aspects regarding the aseptic packaging of food
Aseptic packaging involves both sterilisation of the product and of the materials and packaging used. Researchers at University Politehnica Bucharest have published an article (980 kB) on the different aspects regarding the aseptic packaging of food products. The article was published in ACTA TECHNICA CORVINIENSIS – Bulletin of Engineering.

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