Sustainability : Food packaging made from banana fibre

Papyrus Australia’s mission is to displace plastic and forest-sourced products by using banana fibre. Now they lodged an Australian patent application for its innovative banana fibre production process which produces a cost-efficient environmentally friendly

fibre ideal for use in moulded food packaging products.

Banana fibre as a by-product of banana production, sourced from banana palm trunks and already there in abundance. There are approximately 3000 hectares of banana plantations in Australia and an estimated 10 million hectares worldwide creating approximately 2.2 billion tonnes of agricultural annually making banana trunks a sustainable and renewable fibre source. Banana fibre is water resistant and fire retardant and on the other hand decomposes naturally in landfill.

The significant commercial value of Papyrus' process was recently proven in a series of trials in which the company successfully produced commercial quantities of high-quality biodegradable moulded food packaging using off-the-shelf moulding machines.

Papyrus Australia’s Managing Director Ramy Abraham Azer said this new patent complements the two existing patents already held by the Company –covering the processes of treating waste banana tree trunks and creating homogenous banana fibre chips from veneered banana fibre with zero waste. “This new patent represents a fundamentally important step, both in the process of refining raw banana fibre to enable it to be used in the production of food-quality, moulded packaging products, but also in our journey towards our end goal of replacing plastic packaging for a more sustainable future.”