Researchers produce packaging material from brewery waste
Published: Tuesday, Feb 27th 2024, 09:30
Updated At: Wednesday, Feb 28th 2024, 00:59
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Swiss researchers have produced a packaging material from beer brewery waste. The Swiss Federal Laboratories for Materials Science and Technology (Empa) announced on Tuesday that it could be used to package foodstuffs such as meat in the future.
Using the process developed by Empa researchers, so-called nanocellulose is produced from spent grains, the malt used in beer production. According to Empa, this biodegradable material can be processed into packaging or fiber-reinforced plastics, for example.
This material was previously obtained from wood. However, according to the researchers, wood can be put to better use elsewhere. "With our process, we can obtain high-quality materials from a very cheap and widely available waste product that is largely wasted today," Empa researcher Gilberto Siqueira was quoted as saying in the press release.
The spent grains used by the researchers came from the Pentabier brewery in Dübendorf ZH. The scientists extracted the nanocellulose fibers from this spent grain and processed them into an aerogel by freeze-drying. An aerogel is an "airy" material that has excellent thermal insulation properties due to its many pores.
According to Empa, this property makes it suitable for packaging temperature-sensitive foods, for example. The researchers presented the new process to experts in the journal "ACS Sustainable Chemistry & Engineering".
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