Food Packaging Materials with Special Reference to Biopolymers-Properties and Applications

Food is an important material for survival. The increasing world population, urbanization, and globalization are responsible for more food. This has increased challenges in food storage and safety. Therefore, it is necessary to preserve food by suitable packaging materials. The packaging materials are useful for giving longer life to the food and improving quality during transportation, storage and distribution. Innovations and developments in food packaging, have become very important in the food industry. Variety of packaging materials such as plastics, paper, metal, and glass are used in food packaging. Most widely used packaging materials are non-biodegradable plastics but these are harmful to environment and human health. Therefore, the food industry is in search of environment friendly replacement of non-biodegradable plastics by biodegradable plastics. However, no systematic literature is available on the subject, so there is a need to summarise the available information in a systematic way. Polymer packaging materials with special reference to biodegradable plastics have been discussed in detail. Different type of biodegradable plastics with their functionality and applications in food packaging have been summarised. Literature available has shown that biodegradable plastics are much better for food packaging as compared to other packaging materials. Increasing fundamental research in the use of biodegradable polymers in food packaging and effort to protect the environment, requires deep understanding and there are lot of challenges for commercialization, which are to be tackled. All these aspects have been discussed in this review article.