Enhancing Packaging Sustainability with Natural Fiber Reinforced Biocomposites: An outlook into the future

Abstract

Packaging across diverse sectors like food, FMCG products, pharmaceuticals, cosmetics, and electronics predominantly relies on petroleum-based materials. These petroleum-based non-renewable resources significantly impact the environment throughout their life cycle, emitting polluting gases, demanding energy-intensive manufacturing, and causing air, water, and land pollution during disposal. These problems can be minimized by using eco-friendly materials such as materials made from natural fibres, and agricultural waste that is biodegradable in nature. Natural fibre-reinforced biocomposite materials have a high potential to be used in sustainable packaging applications due to their lower environmental impact compared to petroleum-based materials. However, the use of biocomposites is very limited in the packaging sector and growing exponentially. Recently, agriculture waste fibres have been used for the development of various biocomposites-based packaging. In this paper, prior work has been analysed to identify the impact associated with petroleum-based packaging materials, advantages and potential of natural fiber-reinforced biocomposites in the packaging sector, manufacturing techniques, recent development, challenges, and prospects have been discussed.