Abstract
There is a paramount demand on the enhancement of plastic package properties to reduce food loss and waste. With this awareness, ternary composite films based on low density polyethylene (LDPE) reinforced with silver- (Ag/FS), copper- (Cu/FS) and copper hydroxynitrate-fumed silica (CuHS/FS) micron-sized dual-side fillers, were produced via melt-blending and compression molding techniques. The ternary films exhibited antibacterial activity against the foodborne pathogens Staphylococcus aureus and Salmonella enterica, showing a stronger effect in the LDPE-Cu/FS with a 0.3% and 30.9% survival ratio, followed by LDPE-CuHS/FS films with a 0.4% and 50.7%, respectively. The specific Cu migration presented a maximum value of 1.29 mg/ kg of food simulant, that is within the threshold limit established by current legislation for food contact materials, thus permitting their use as packaging films for acidic, alcoholic, and aqueous foodstuffs. This work presents the relevance of alternative fillers to produce active packaging products.
Highlights
Nowadays, food loss and waste are still a very problematic issue
Our results show that the copper-based films (LDPE-CuHS/fumed silica (FS) and low density polyethylene (LDPE)-Cu/FS) were efficient against both bacteria, achieving bacterial reduction as high as 99.7% vs. S. aureus and 69.1% vs. S. enterica
The specific migration test was obtained under different liquid food simulants: food simulant C for aqueous and alcoholic food (10% v/v ethanol) and food simulant B for acidic food (3% v/v acetic acid), ac cording to the Regulation (EU) no. 10/2011 (EC, 2011)
Summary
Food loss and waste are still a very problematic issue. The FAO (Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations), in a 2019 report, presented that close to one-third of the world food intended for human use (approximately 1.3 billion tonnes of food per year) is lost or wasted (FAO, 2019). The food packaging is amongst the solutions, and as reported by AMERIPEN (American Institute for Pack aging and Environment), approximately 20–25% of food waste can be avoided by applying food packaging technologies (AMERIPEN, 2020). This active role is related to the improvement of the food shelf life (quality-related) and safe life (safety-related), that is often through, but , the reduction of microbial growth, being this associated to foodborne diseases, responsible for 420 thousand deaths in a 2010 estimation (WHO, 2015). As the most used inorganic fillers to provide this active property, one can include: (i) metallic nanoparticles (NPs), such as AgNPs (Jo et al 2018) and CuNPs (Lomate, Dandi, & Mishra, 2018); (ii) Ag-Cu alloys (Ahmed et al 2018), and (iii) metal oxides, such as ZnO (Shankar, Wang, & Rhim, 2018), TiO2 (Díez-Pascual & Díez-Vicente, 2015), and CuO (Dehghani, Peigh ambardoust, Peighambardoust, Hosseini, & Regenstein, 2019; Peigh ambardoust, Peighambardoust, Pournasir, & Mohammadzadeh Pakdel, 2019)
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