Lignocellulosic bioplastics in sustainable packaging – Recent developments in materials design and processing: A comprehensive review

Abstract

Lignocellulosic materials, despite their abundance and attractiveness, have long been marred with challenges in optimising the cost-functionality-quality trade-off. This comprehensive authoritative review paper explores how various lignocellulosic feedstock have been utilised to prepare marketable and sustainable bioplastics, as potential substitutes to conventional petroleum-based packaging. Dependence on hydrocarbon-derived plastics is increasingly being supplanted by both consumer-driven and sustainability-oriented materials design. This comprehensive paper encompasses a broad review relating to recent research (2013−2023) on the innovations and heuristic approaches to modify lignocellulose for the production of packaging films. The review paper holds extensive focus across various lignocellulosic materials such as - but not limited to - cellulose nanomaterials, cellulose esters and grafted cellulose. Advances in processes reported to date such as mechanochemical, chemical, thermochemical, biochemical and other novel methods have been studied. The materials design and process implications in terms of its cost, energy input and sustainability in its true sense, for all known techniques have been extensively investigated in this review paper. The review paper has further provided an elaborate process-structure-property-performance framework that characterises how material properties could be fine-tuned via different process considerations. A techno-economic feasibility overview for said processes and materials' use is also described herein.