Food packaging material to be produced from sunflower stalks

With the project titled "Obtaining Bio-based Polymers from Agricultural Industrial Waste and By-products and Their Use as Food Packaging Material," prepared by the engineering faculties of the two universities, the aim is to include sunflower stalks left in the field after harvest in the recycling process and use them as packaging.

Project leader Assoc. Prof. Dr. Buket Aşkın, a faculty member at the Kırklareli University Faculty of Engineering, Department of Food Engineering, stated that they are conducting research on the evaluation of waste materials and by-products.

Emphasizing that recycling waste materials is very important for the food industry, Aşkın said, "We encounter waste materials in large quantities in many different areas. Both as by-products and as waste materials. It is very important to convert these into more eco-friendly products with high added value."

Aşkın emphasized that they are striving to support the goals of the Zero Waste project and ensure its sustainability.

DURABILITY IS BEING RESEARCHED

Explaining that they are conducting a study using sunflower stalks to prevent agricultural waste from remaining on the land and to turn it into value-added products, Aşkın spoke as follows:

"We chose the sunflower stalks left in sunflower fields as our raw material. We obtained carboxymethyl cellulose from these stalks. Plastic materials remain in nature for a very long time and do not decompose, and at the same time, the petroleum resources used in the production of these products are limited. We have set our goals to turn many different problems into advantages.

We are working on obtaining carboxymethyl cellulose from sunflower stalks and using it as biodegradable food packaging material. In the later stages of the study, we aim to extract coloring agents from materials that are waste from the fruit juice industry and add them to the material we obtained from sunflower stalks to improve the properties of these packaging materials."

Assoc. Prof. Dr. Aşkın stated that they continue to examine how long the material they obtained remains in nature and how long it takes to decompose.

Stating that sunflower stalks could be a new product in terms of applicability, Aşkın noted the following:

"It is possible to obtain packaging materials that can be integrated into many different areas such as cheese packaging, chocolate packaging, and egg packaging. The most fundamental goal of our project is to utilize waste materials to create packaging material and contribute to the reduction of plastic material usage. We aim to obtain eco-friendly packaging materials that decompose more easily in nature and will not harm human health."