Tapioca starch films reinforced with microcrystalline cellulose for potential food packaging application
Nowadays, environmental pollution resulted from the usage of non-degradable materials such as petroleum-based materials for packaging applications is becoming crucial (Risyon et al., 2016). Among the packaging applications, food packaging represents the single largest element whereby demand for food packaging has been growing due to the increase in the number of world population. Nevertheless, this problem can be solved by replacing the non-degradable materials with biodegradable materials such as biopolymer (Dthman, 2014; Dthman et al., 2017a). Biopolymer is a polymer produced by living organism that consists of monomeric units that are covalently bonded, forming chain like molecules. Biopolymer falls into two categories which are naturals and synthetic biopolymer. The natural biopolymers are more environmental friendly than synthetic biopolymers and among them, starch particularly tapioca starch (TPS) is a favourable biopolymer due to its low cost, widely accessible, exhibiting thermoplastic and biodegradability properties (Almasi et al., 2010). TPS is isotropic, odorless, tasteless, colourless, non-toxic, and biologically degradable (Dufresne et al., 2013). TPS is also edible and thus suitable for food packaging application as it can be consumed and helps to minimize waste.