E1957- Seaweed-based flexible and home-compostable food packaging

SeaweedPack will focus on developing novel and circular seaweed based flexible films which can be used for food contact applications. The aim is to develop suitable films with the required mechanical and barrier properties for the industry. In this project the manufacturing process will also be optimized in order to be able to produce at scale, as required per the industry.

In the proposed project the two SMEs, B'ZEOS (NO) and Moses (ES), which specialize in the development of seaweed-based food packaging and its manufacturing and testing, respectively, will jointly work on finding technically and economically viable solutions for making flexible and home compostable food packaging films based on seaweed extracts. Our films can be used alone or as barrier coatings on paper substrates and have similar properties to the existing non-compostable plastic materials used for food packaging. Particularly, as learned from our conversations with stakeholders such as Nestlé, we will mature our technology to ensure that our film will have good mechanical, barrier, and compostability properties. In a previous project (i.e. PlastiSea - Novel enhanced bioplastics from sustainable processing of seaweed), the consortium has managed to manufacture continuous films, validating the technology in an industrially relevant environment. Therefore, the starting TRL of this project is 5.