The National Plastics Exposition (NPE) recently took place March 23-27 in Orlando, Florida. Let's go behind the scenes and take a look from a plastics engineering standpoint at some of the regulatory impacts in key plastics end-uses and related technologies.
In a three-part recap, we'll look at automotive lightweighting, food labeling/packaging and green building.
Food labeling/packaging regulatory development
The United Kingdom is recommending that food-labeling changes be made to make it easier for shoppers to know when food is safe to eat. Labels intended for stock rotation, such as "sell by" dates, should be eliminated from the package to reduce some of the confusion.
According to U.K. government officials, confusion over food labeling was responsible for an estimated 750 million of the 12 billion British pounds of edible-food wastage each year.
It is visually difficult to distinguish between packaged fish or meat products that are fresh or inedible. Therefore, researchers at the Fraunhofer Research Institution for Modular Solid State Technologies (EMFT) have developed a sensor film that can be integrated into the package itself, where it takes over the role of quality control.
The sensor film is integrated inside the packaging, where it responds to biogenic amines to indicate that food has spoiled. Molecules are produced when foods, particularly fish and meat, decay. If amines are released into the air within the packaging, the indicator dye on the sensor film reacts, changing its color from yellow to blue. Once a certain concentration range is reached, the color change is clearly visible and provides a warning to the consumer.
A barrier layer between the sensor film and product is permeable only to gaseous amines. This protects the food product from the indicator chemicals, which cannot pass through the sensor film barrier layer.
Information provided by the sensor film is based on monitoring of the food itself, unlike the expiration date which is based on an estimated shelf life. The technology, much less expensive than alternatives such as electronic sensors, is cost-effective enough to allow broad-based use in meat/seafood packaging.
The sensor, still in development, does not have full EU/FDA food contact approval. The EMFT institute is conducting migration studies and is looking for industrial partners for pre-commercial development.
BASF Future Business
BASF OnVu ICE label.
Separately, BASF has developed the OnVu ICE label that facilitates cold-chain monitoring to inform retailers and consumers if a frozen food is still safe to eat. The OnVu time-temperature indicators are cost-effective, easy-to-use smart labels placed upon food packaging to monitor the cold chain for chilled and deep-frozen food, that show the current state of the product by changing color with time-temperature history.
A temperature-sensitive ink is used to print a thermometer symbol on the product label or even, in the packaging line, directly on the packaging. The indicator at the center of the thermometer is activated for use by means of UV light, which causes it to turn a dark blue color.
From this moment on, the indicator monitors the cold chain. As time goes by and/or if the cold chain is broken, the color pales. The darker blue its color, the better the cold chain has been maintained. The speed of the color change process and the temperatures that trigger it can be customized individually.
When it comes to fruits and vegetables, a revolutionary ethylene absorber for produce packaging is making its way into the packaging marketplace. Ethylene absorption technology from It'sFresh! Ltd is being used to boost the typical shelf life of refrigerated strawberries from four to six days.
Marks & Spencer is the first U.K. retailer to use this ethylene absorption technology to extend the shelf life of fresh fruit and decrease produce spoilage.
They launched the use of the new ethylene absorption system in their retail strawberry packages at the beginning of the year and are looking to extend the packaging innovation across all of its fresh berries during the course of this year. An independent trial conducted by East Malling Research and the Natural Resources Institute at Greenwich University confirmed the effectiveness of the It'sFresh! ethylene remover.
How does it work? A food grade nonwoven strip coated with a patented mixture of high-tech minerals and clays (palladium and zeolite), offers over 100 times greater ethylene-absorption capacity compared other known ethylene-absorption materials. Positioned within the package, the 8-by-4.5-centimeter strip does not affect package recyclability, and any package incremental cost is more than offset by produce quality plus shelf-life improvements.
Marks & Spencer tests showed use of the active-packaging strip in retail strawberry containers would reduce waste by 4 percent. This is equivalent to 40,000 one-pint packs of strawberries. The fruits will also taste fresh longer.
Tesco is also trialing the innovation and is the first retailer to test the packaging on tomatoes and avocados. Tesco says use of the ethylene-remover strips could save 1.6 million packs of tomatoes and 350,000 packs of avocados a year.
