About this Research Topic

Background

Food packaging has a crucial function in modern food industry. It contributes to food protection and preservation during its shelf-life, containment, communication, and marketing. Traditional petroleum-derived materials have caused serious environmental problems worldwide. The use of biodegradable and renewable materials, including biopolymers, edible and microbial polymers from agro-food waste, represents a great alternative to protect the environment, give economic value to underutilized products and decoupling the food packaging industry from fossil one. However, these materials may have limited efficiency in food preservation and in scaling up the production, and, in the meantime, should meet consumers' acceptance to ensure the commercial success. Thus, future research in this field needs to meet, at the same time, consumers, environmental, and industrial’s demands.

Packaging is an instrument of society’s access to consumer goods in a safe, practical and economically viable way, but also one of the most important sources of environmental pollution due to both the material production and waste persistence. Thus, food packaging field innovation requires an interdisciplinary approach to achieve the goals of environmental sustainability, the commercial success. Despite the huge development of this field of research, a wide overview of the food packaging system challenges and innovative solution is still missing. This Research Topics is aimed to integrate these aspects by exploring innovative materials availability coupled with their efficiency in food safety and their environmental impact, while investigating the cultural and social drivers that affect consumers choice in different geographical areas. The integration of these information would offer environmentally safe solution to industries and policy makers, to encourage industries to move forward a sustainable food packaging production system.

This Research Topic is aimed to shed light on the challenges related with the food packaging industry, from the materials to the policy and to the consumer perception, and the innovative solutions to overcome them. The submission of Original Research and Review articles that particularly focus on the following topics are welcomed:

• Life Cycle Assessment and cost of new biodegradable material production

• Safety and new technological advances in edible food packaging

• The use of biopolymers into food packaging and their limit

• The consumers’ wishes and perception of food packaging

• The policy ‘s gaps into the commercial regulation of new materials

• Innovative solution to make the food packaging system eco-friendly and sustainable

• Active food packaging innovation

Keywords: Food Packaging, Policy ‘s gaps, Biopolymers, Life Cycle Assessment, Consumers’ perception

Important note: All contributions to this Research Topic must be within the scope of the section and journal to which they are submitted, as defined in their mission statements. Frontiers reserves the right to guide an out-of-scope manuscript to a more suitable section or journal at any stage of peer review.

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