Tailoring food waste feedstocks for enhanced biopolymer production for use in soft plastics

Presentation by Dr Leonie van ‘t Hag (Monash University)

Abstract

Biopolymers can be used to replace soft plastics in packaging and drug delivery applications, however, due to their high crystallinity use of polyhydroxybutyrate (PHB or short-chain length PHA) and polylactic acid (PLA) in soft plastics remains challenging. We have developed medium-chain-length polyhydroxyalkanoate (mcl-PHA) nanoemulsions which are bioderived and biodegradable. The effect of feeding glucose and fatty acids from food waste on the microbial production of mcl-PHAs has been studied to explore the possibility of producing mcl-PHAs from food waste and to tune polymer properties for their applications.