Résumé
Plastic has become ubiquitous in modern life due to its practicality, convenience, and safety benefits. However, its widespread use has led to significant environmental issues, particularly in the field of food packaging, significant contributor to world’s plastic waste1. Once used, most of this packaging is either incinerated or landfilled, contributing to ecosystems contamination. Plastic pollution could be reduced by replacing conventional plastics with biodegradable ones. However, to ensure the sustainability of these alternatives, it is crucial to keep them in the economy and out of the environment for as long as possible. Hence the need to study their recycling, particularly in closed-loop system for food packaging applications. Today, only PET bottles are decontaminated and thermally reshaped in the recycling process2, and there is a huge lack of knowledge on the end of life (EoL) loops of biodegradable plastics. This is partly due to misconceptions about the technical and economic challenges of their recycling, such as insufficient volumes, contamination risks, and greater degradation under thermal recycling conditions. ECO2R project in which this work is included seeks to challenge the misconception that biodegradable plastics are only suitable for composting. It aims to design the end-of-life route for biodegradable plastic packaging by identifying the properties that influence recyclability in a closed-loop system, such as decontamination efficiency and structural stability (figure 1). In particular, the work presented here is focusing on the ability of certain biodegradable polyesters such as PLA, PBS and PBAT to be contaminated by the surrogate’s panel identified for PET and referenced in FDA and EFSA regulations. The relationship between the polymer structures and their capacity for contamination was studied. In the future, a wider range of contaminants will be investigated.