Abstract
The debate on environmental effects of everyday packaging materials has long reached the scientific community. The quest is on to design cheap, but also sustainable and eco - friendly packaging solutions. A hot contestant material within the application is the ever present wood based paper. In addition to meeting logistic requirements, paper packaging must protect the packaged goods from environmental influences, while keeping aroma molecules in the food. To quantify both aspects in depth, exploration of adsorption of organic molecules on paper is required. As paper is a rather complex material, adsorption and desorption experiments can be notoriously difficult to interpret. This paper will demonstrate that the adsorption of organic molecules on a cellulose surface can be investigated simply? by using temperature programmed desorption (TPD) experiments. The experiments show that both non-polar and polar molecules (n-decane and deuterated methanol) readily adsorb onto cellulose films. During desorption one finds the polar molecule bound to the cellulose surface more heavily, effectively oder doch strongly? than the non-polar molecule.
Highlights
The discussion of benefits vs. environmental cost of packaging materials is constant
The exposed molecules adsorb onto the cellulose film, because adsorption is accomplished via the gas phase
Without prior gas adsorption onto the cellulose films one finds several fragments desorbing in the same temperature range as shown by the temperature programmed desorption (TPD) spectra below
Summary
The discussion of benefits vs. environmental cost of packaging materials is constant. In this age of ever-rising environmental awareness, customers often reward “going green” and paper securely holds a spot at the forefront of the issue. With paper being a porous material, a key feature is the transport of molecules through the porous structure to gain insight and control over the aforementioned issues. One of the questions to be answered in this context is the extent to which molecules adsorb onto the walls of the pores. This makes adsorption studies of molecules on cellulosic surfaces all the more essential
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