Yagya Venkateshwaran

• Thesis: Polymer Coatings and, Paper Pulp Quality, Recycling Efficiency and Environmental Performance of the Material.

Summary: Plastic packaging waste is one the biggest contributor towards climate change. As the concern for the environment has increase, it resulted in the enforcement of legal requirement to reduce and replace the use of plastic where ever possible which in most cases is replaced by paper. But paper as a packaging material does not have any barrier properties and is useless without coatings, it is important to understand how these coatings affects the recyclability of the material and is paper a better packaging material than plastic. This FMT analyze the existing paper packaging technologies, barrier coatings and coating technology, trends and legal requirement used for food industry. Experimental analysis for extracting pulp from the selected packaging material according the “Voluntary Standard for Repulping and Recycling Corrugated Fiberboard Treated to Improve Its Performance in the Presence of Water and Water Vapor. Part 1 – Repulpability”. To investigate the effects of ink, polymer coating and aseptic packaging on the repulpability and provide recommendations.

The different type of coating and additives, environmental regulation and market trend analyzed in literature review, helped the selection of the specimen used for the experiment. The results of the experiments shows that ink on the packaging material doesn’t affect much on repulpability as the reject rate in the material with less ink was around 2.72% whereas the material with ink was about 3.24%. The aseptic packaging is not repulpable and should be replaced in the market, as the result showed the packaging material with a layer of foil & LDPE has the highest percentage of reject with approximately 29% whereas one without them has approx. 13% reject rate. In coated packaging the material with additional polymer film has a reject rate of 11% on the other hand coated package without a layer of polymer has only 5% reject rate.