Caracterização de filme comercial constituído por biopolímero biodegradável compostável com impressão flexográfica

Abstract

Population growth and consumerism in recent decades have led to increased pollution and waste accumulation, threatening the health of the planet and the well-being of future generations. Plastic waste represents a major challenge for ecosystems due to inappropriate disposal due to failures in society's environmental education. The use of biodegradable materials, which have received considerable attention in recent years, is a viable alternative to this problem. In this context, biodegradable and compostable biopolymeric films, which aim to be degraded after a period of time, becoming soil-friendly by-products, have been studied. However, such materials present the major challenge of batch-to-batch variability, since they are from renewable sources, such as corn, whose quality depends on the harvest. This makes their characterization and the establishment of large-scale industrial procedures difficult. This study aimed to characterize a commercial biodegradable and compostable biopolymer film from a renewable source (corn), printed with solvent-based ink in flexography. The purpose is to help solve a problem that occurs in films after winding, where the printed art is replicated in the layers of the film, making the product non-compliant and making it unusable. This deviation has already caused several financial and technical losses to the supplier company, justifying the performance of this study. In this work, samples of the biodegradable film were analyzed, as well as of more common commercial films on the market, for comparative purposes. The aim was to understand the properties of the material, such as polarity, wettability and contact angle, factors that can directly influence the printing of the films, in addition to proposing solutions to the identified problem.