Today, fresh food as well as convenience food is sold in packages. Hygienic conditions, long shelf life and easy availability of these packed products account for our standard of living. However, this convenience contributes in a significant way to environmental pollution, as packaging is mainly achieved by plastic materials in this case. Biodegradable packaging materials have been on the market for many decades. However, there are severe restrictions preventing their broad application in food packaging, as these materials do not provide the requested properties, such as a sufficient barrier against water vapour, oxygen or flavours. Our idea is to improve these properties by a biodegradable coating. We have developed high-barrier coatings based on a class of materials with glass-like structural units, so called ORMOCER®s. However, these coatings are not biobased, nor biodegradable. The target of the planned project is the development of new functional hybrid (inorganic-organic) coatings for applications in food, cosmetic & medical device packaging. These new coatings will be based on the work of Fraunhofer ISC who has patented and licensed ORMOCER® lacquers used for coating applications in order to increase barrier properties of packaging films. The aim of the planned project is to synthesise new coating materials based on bioORMOCER®s, which are formed of functionalised biopolymers extracted from lignocellulosic biomass sources using the bioORMOCER® synthesis approach. In particular, the polymeric structures of hemicelluloses and polyesters will be exploited. By the use of these biopolymer, the organoalkoxysilanes which are components of the state-of-the art ORMOCER® lacquers will be substituted to obtain a purely biobased functional coating material. The new functional bioORMOCER®s will be coated on flexible and rigid biopolymer substrates and tested for packaging applications for food, cosmetic and medical devices.

The MANDALA project presents a sustainable solution for the plastic packaging sector which tackles 3 pillars: eco-design, dual functionality & end-of-life; with the aim to find a final solution based on multilayer monomaterial packaging with functionalities compared to multimaterial ones and fully produced with biobased & recycled polymers in order to reach a full circularity of resources. MANDALA will develop new adhesives with dual functionality (easy to split and barrier properties) by incorporating thermoreversible covalent bonds and radiation absorbing nanoparticles, which at the same time will generate a tortuous path enhancing barrier properties that are critical for end-user. In addition, new polymer blends with increased biobased and recycled content of film layers will be developed. Their combination in a multilayer product will set the basis for new food (meat, ready-to-eat) and pharma (pill blister) packaging products. MANDALA project will demonstrate that the de-lamination technology can be up-scaled and applied to reach intermediate solutions for multilayer/multimaterial packaging (being biobased or not) progressively helping to become the end-of-life more sustainable by recovering all fractions and providing clean streams for their biodegradation or recycling. MANDALA project will directly contribute to achieve KPI 1, KPI 2, KPI 6, KPI 8 and demonstrate the solution decreasing the end-of-life costs and CO2 emissions in more than a 30%. It will develop innovations in 3 KETS. MANDALA consortium involves 12 partners (4RTD, 5SME, 1SME cluster and 2 Large Companies) accounting 2 BIC full members and 2 associated. The 42-months project will comprise a total estimated budget of 4,573,892,5€ and requested funding of 3,650,921,75€. There is a strong engagement of the industry with 922,970,75€ in-kinds (20,2%) and 4,869,731€ in additional activities during the project (machine acquisition) and 3,820,000€ envisaged to upgrade TRL after the end of the project.