Sustainable utilization of fruit and vegetable waste bioresources for bioplastics production

Abstract

Nowadays, rapidly increasing production, use and disposable of plastic products has become one of the utmost environmental issues. Our current circumstances in which the food supply chain is demonstrated as containing plastic particles and other plastic-based impurities, represents a significant health risk to humans, animals, and environmental alike. According to this point of view, biodegradable plastic material aims to produce a more sustainable and greener world with a lower ecological impact. Bioplastics are being investigated as an environmentally friendly candidate to address this problem and hence global bioplastic production has seen significant growth and expansion in recent years. This article focuses on a few critical issues that must be addressed for bioplastic production to become commercially viable. Although the reduction of fruit and vegetable waste biomass has an apparent value in terms of environmental benefits and sustainability, commercial success at industrial scale has remained flat. This is due to various factors, including biomass feedstocks, pretreatment technologies, enzymatic hydrolysis, and scale-up issues in the industry, all of which contribute to high capital and operating costs. This review paper summarizes the global overview of bioplastics derived from fruit and vegetable waste biomass. Furthermore, economic and technical challenges associated with industrialization and diverse applications of bioplastics in biomedical, agricultural, and food-packaging fields due to their excellent biocompatibility properties are reviewed.

Highlights

• Review of the diverse types and characteristics of sustainability of biobased plastics

• Improved pretreatment technologies can develop to enhance greater yield

• Enzyme hydrolysis process used for bioplastic extraction & hasten industrial scale-up

• Focus on technical challenges facing commercialized the bioplastics

• Detailed discussion on the application for sustainability of biodegradable plastics

Keywords:

• Bioplastics
• biodegradable
• biomass-feedstock
• pretreatment
• enzymatic hydrolysis
• industrialization

Acknowledgment

V.K.G. and L.G. would like to acknowledge that this work has been done under the umbrella of the Subcontract work between Scotland’s Rural College (SRUC), UK, and South China Botanical Garden, (SCBG), China.

Author contributions

LG: Validation, Visualization, Writing – Reviewing & Editing. AKP: Writing – original draft, Data curation, Investigation, Formal analysis, Editing. CY: Writing – Reviewing & Editing. VKT: Visualization, Writing – Reviewing & Editing. JN: Writing – Reviewing & Editing. WC: Writing – Reviewing & Editing. YJ: Visualization, Writing – Reviewing & Editing. SK: Reviewing & Editing. VKG: Conceptualization, Validation, Visualization, Investigation, Supervision, Writing – Reviewing & Editing.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Additional information

Funding

L.G. also acknowledges the funding support received from the National Natural Science Foundation of China [Grant No. 31772033], Natural Science Foundation for Distinguished Young Scholars of Guangdong province [Grant No. 2021B1515020024], Youth Innovation Promotion Association, Chinese Academy of Sciences [Grant No. 2018380], CAS President’s International Fellowship Initiative [Grant No. 2022VCA0001].