Disposable food packaging is a single-use plastics that can include any disposable plastic item which could be designed and use only once. Researchers focused towards developing bioplastic, however, mostly used natural recourses are edible food such as corn, rice and potato which can create the problem of food security.This study aimed to prepare and evaluated bioplastic food packaging material from avocado seed starch and sugarcane bagasse cellulose. Bioplastic food packaging material was prepared from avocado seed starch and sugarcane bagasse cellulose (0, 5, 10, 15w/w%) and glycerol as a plasticizer with various amount of 3, 4, 5mL through solution casting technique. Characterization of prepared bioplastic was performed using the universal tensile testing machine, FTIR, UV-Vis spectroscopy, and SEM. Results have shown that an increasing amount of glycerol resulted in increases in water absorption, density, water vapor permeability, and elongation at break of prepared bioplastic. However, it causes decreases in %transmittance, the tensile strength of prepared bioplastic. Likewise, the addition of cellulose fiber (0-15%) increases %transmittance ranged (91.34±0.12-63.03±0.05 %), tensile strength (2.91±6.18-4.21±6.713MPa) of prepared bioplastic. On the other hand, it causes decreases in water absorption (14.4±0.25-9.40±0.007%), water vapor permeability (9.306x10^-12±0.3-3.57x10^-12±0.15gs⁻¹m⁻¹Pa⁻¹) and elongation at break (34.46±3.37-27.63±5.67%) of prepared bioplastic. All prepared bioplastic films completely degraded within 15 days under open soil atmosphere.

Thermograms of bioplastic at various concentrations af SBC (a) 0% (b) 5% (c) 10% (d) 15%

FTIR Spectra of raw materials and produced bioplastic

Ramesh Duraisamy

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