Fraunhofer ISC Earns German Packaging Award in Sustainability Category

The conversion of packaging to recyclability, biogenic raw materials or compostability poses great challenges for the industry. 

The Fraunhofer Institute for Silicate Research ISC supports packaging manufacturers in this process with sustainable multifunctional barrier coatings for easily recyclable, biobased or compostable packaging. 

For this development, Dr. Sabine Amberg-Schwab was honored with the German Packaging Award in the “Sustainability” category.

The public debate about the images of the worldwide pollution of the environment by packaging waste contributes to questioning previous packaging materials and the way they are handled. 

Fossil resources also become scarce and create the need to develop new packaging strategies. 

The national implementation of the European Packaging Directive, the German Packaging Act (VerpackG), came into force on Jan. 1, 2019. 

The Fraunhofer ISC provides sustainable material solutions to meet these new requirements.

The Fraunhofer ISC in Würzburg has more than 30 years of experience in the development of functional barrier coatings for various applications (e.g. food or technical packaging). 

These inorganic-organic hybrid polymers (ORMOCER) are an own material class of Fraunhofer ISC, which can be designed like a toolbox and can be used to produce multifunctional coatings for plastic films or paper. They protect against the migration of oxygen, water vapor and fragrances as well as against mechanical abrasion.

Even extremely thin layers are sufficient to reach barrier requirements, so coated packaging made of mono-materials is easily recyclable. In the packaging sector, this opens up the possibility of replacing the current non-recyclable multi-layer composite films with mono-materials.

Dr. Amberg-Schwab and her team have further developed the coating lacquers for even more sustainable material solutions and the independence from fossil resources in the packaging sector: They are now also available as bio-based and compostable variants. 

For this new class of materials, bioORMOCERs, organic-fossil components of ORMOCERs are replaced by bio-organic building blocks from e. g. from biological waste streams. 

This “upgrading of organic waste” means that there is no competition with food cultivation areas. The residues are turned into new high-quality raw materials for the synthesis of bioORMOCERs. 

These bio-lacquers have comparable properties to ORMOCERs and perform the same functions: very good barrier properties, abrasion-resistant surfaces, over-printable and bondable. 

They can be used for food packaging as well as for cosmetics and pharmaceuticals. The bioORMOCERs are suitable for the coating of biopolymers as well as for conventional plastics or paper packaging. 

They can be applied to flat substrates in fast roll-to-roll processes, but also complex geometries such as trays or pots can be coated.