Ozone packaging materials

Song, Y. S., Al-Taher, F., and Sadler, G. (2003). Migration of volatile degradation products into ozonated water from plastic packaging materials. Food Addit. Contam. 20, 985-994. 

Packaging materials are all, to varying extents, damaging to the environment. For example, the manufacture of poly(styrene) (PS) products involves the use of a variety of hazardous chemicals and starting materials, such as benzene, a known mutagen and a probable carcinogen. Chlorofluorocarbons have also been used in the manufacture of blown or expanded PS products. Chlorofluorocarbons have been linked to the destruction of the ozone layer. 

Freshly extruded, 50 tm C2H -ethyl acrylate-maleic anhydride copolymer film is treated by 500 ml/m oxygen containing 10 g/m ozone and is calendered with 200 tm monolayer C2CIF3 - polymer film at 15°C to produce moisture-proof packaging material with intra-layer adhesion of 800 g/15 mm and thermosealing force of 3.6 kg/15 mm against 250 and 1.3, respectively, in the absence of ozone treatment [119]. 

A third LCA that calculated the environmental profiles of clamshells was created for PLA, PET, and PS plastic materials. The LCA was calculated for use as containers for strawberries. The functional unit was 1000 containers that have packaging capacity to hold 0.4536 kg of strawberries. The LCA included transportation effects and provided environmental impact results for global wanning, energy consumption, aquatic acidification, ozone layer depletion, aquatic eutrophication, respiratory organics, respiratory inorganics, land occupations, and aquatic eco-toxicity. SimaPro LCA software was used to calculate the environmental impacts of the plastic materials. The mass of the PET was calculated based on the same volume as the PLA clamshell and the density ratio of PET and PLA (Madival et al. 2009). 

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