Sustainable Food Packaging Solutions: Polysaccharide-Based Films and Coatings

In recent decades, it has become more crucial to package food products and prevent them from contamination and spoilage, especially understood during the COVID-19 pandemic situation, where the fabrication and transportation shut down. Food packaging materials made of petroleum-based plastics have turned into a massive waste in the environment. Among the global plastic waste, 50% of all plastic consumption belongs to the packaging industry. For a sustainable packaging market, there is a need for the development of inexpensive, biodegradable, and biobased alternative materials possessing food preservation properties. Polysaccharides are the most abundant biopolymers on Earth, and they have become candidates for the replacement of synthetic plastics with their low cost, biopolymeric structure, and abundance. This review summarizes the recent publications about polysaccharide-based food packages. In this chapter, biobased films and coatings made of various types of polysaccharides (cellulose and derivatives, chitosan, starch, alginate, and pectin) are described for food packaging applications. Each section focuses on one of the main polysaccharides and its properties, film formability, film processing methods, and properties as food packaging material. Biodegradable functional materials like plasticizers and additives used in the biofilm formulations are explained with their effects on polysaccharide film processability and further packaging properties. Under these sections, the effects of these films on shelf life of foods are also discussed.