Polyhydroxyalkanoate (PHA): Review of synthesis, characteristics, processing and potential applications in packaging

By Elodie Bugnicourt, P. Cinelli, Andrea Lazzeri, V. Alvarez. 2014

816 citations recorded by the source corpus.

Polyhydroxyalkanoates (PHAs) are gaining increasing attention in the biodegradable polymer market due to their promising properties such as high biodegradability in different environments, not just in composting plants, and pro- cessing versatility. Indeed among biopolymers, these biogenic polyesters represent a potential sustainable replacement for fossil fuel-based thermoplastics. Most commercially available PHAs are obtained with pure microbial cultures grown on renewable feedstocks (i.e. glucose) under sterile conditions but recent research studies focus on the use of wastes as growth media. PHA can be extracted from the bacteria cell and then formulated and processed by extrusion for production of rigid and flexible plastic suitable not just for the most assessed medical applications but also considered for applications includ- ing packaging, moulded goods, paper coatings, non-woven fabrics, adhesives, films and performance additives. The present paper reviews the different classes of PHAs, their main properties, processing aspects, commercially available ones, as well as limitations and related improvements being researched, with specific focus on potential applications of PHAs in packag- ing.

Subfields: Automotive Engineering, Biomaterials, Pollution

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/08913a5af5bceea6b03e51edd50293f33a049909

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Citations in the corpus

Recent progress in biodegradable polymers and nanocomposite-based packaging materials for sustainable environment (2018, background): “Polyhydroxybutyrate is a highly crystalline thermoplastic polymer material with low permeability to water vapor and is similar to low-density polyethylene.([69]) Lactic acid and polyhydroxybutyrate offer numerous opportunities for the use in food packaging.”
A research challenge vision regarding management of agricultural waste in a circular bio-based economy (2018, background): “Indeed, PHAs has been identified as a promising potential of the bio-waste bio-refinery (Bugnicourt et al., 2014), especially because: (i) its production process has the best potential to cope with large heterogeneity of the waste feedstock, in particular because the first production step, i.e. the…”
Progress in Toughening Poly(Lactic Acid) with Renewable Polymers (2017, background): “Microbial polyesters, also known as polyhydroxyalkanoates (PHAs), are a class of renewable and biodegradable polymers naturally produced by bacteria in general cultivated on agricultural raw materials.(144) Figure 10a shows the general chemical structure of PHA.”
Bio-sourced polymers as alternatives to conventional food packaging materials: A review (2021, methodology): “PHA was earlier used in the medical field (Bugnicourt et al., 2014), and it is compared with LDPE due to its low water vapor permeability.”