Western chemistry professor Elizabeth Gillies and her collaborators have developed a new biodegradable, hemp-based material that could serve as a sustainable substitute for packaging needs for a wide variety of products. (Jeff Renaud/Western Communications)
Western chemistry professor Elizabeth Gillies and her collaborators have developed a new biodegradable, hemp-based material that could serve as a sustainable substitute for packaging needs for a wide variety of products. (Jeff Renaud/Western Communications) Plastic is cheap and light, and conceivably recyclable, which makes it an easy choice for packaging when it comes to food and cosmetics. But it's also potentially toxic and biologically harmful, making it a non-starter for many environmentally responsible and socially conscious companies in Canada and around the world. Western chemistry professor Elizabeth Gillies , mechanical and materials engineering professor Aaron Price and their research teams worked with industry partner CTK Bio Canada to develop a new biodegradable, hemp-based material that could serve as a sustainable substitute for packaging needs for a wide variety of products. "When it comes to packaging, plastic replaces things like metal and glass. Those are heavy and expensive," said Gillies, who is also the Canada Research Chair in polymeric biomaterials. "Glass recycling is not a very profitable business and while many plastics are potentially recyclable, it often doesn't happen in practice." This lack of recycling, compounded by a global microplastics pollution crisis, led Gillies and her team to find a degradable 'plastic' to solve the problem, or in this case, a hemp-based product.
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