Improving water and oxygen barriers of PLA

31 October 2014

Polylactic acid (PLA) represents one of the most promising biobased polymers for the industrial development of environmentally sustainable packaging. However, oxygen and water barrier properties of PLA based films cannot compete with those of commercially available composite multilayers.
To fill this gap, researchers at the Politecnico di Torino in Italy used the layer-by-layer deposition technique on commercially used PLA thin films. Two different kinds of architectures were designed and prepared. A reduction of 78% of water vapor transmission rate through the functionalized film was obtained for these films. An article about the research is published in Chemistry of Materials.
Click here for an abstract of the article.

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