SP-Milk · Production of a new biodegradable bioplastic made up of biomolecules extracted from expired milk

The global plastic production reached up to 448 million tons in 2018, of which approximately 8 million tons are entering into the oceans every year. The imprudent use of plastics in our everyday life elevated plastics into the major pollutant component of the world seas and oceans. At the same time, every year in Europe 3-6 million tons of milk are thrown away as waste. Splastica is an innovative startup and a spin off from University of Rome Tor Vergata founded in 2019, whose CEO is a woman, which found an innovative way to turn expired milk into a biobased and biodegradable plastic, by means of a patented process. This bioplastic has been widely characterized, showing good hardness, resistance and great stability in a wide range of temperatures, and in contact with food, water, detergents. The single-use plastic industry is the target field of application of SP-Milk bioplastic. Single-use plastics, often also referred to as disposable plastics, are commonly used for plastic packaging and include items intended to be used only once. The recent EU Directive 2019/904, the SUP Directive, imposes, from July 2021, EU wide market restriction measures (bans) for various single-use products such as plastic cutlery, plates, stirrers and straws, oxo-degradable plastics and expanded polystyrene food and drink containers. SPlastica business idea is to bring to the market SP-Milk bioplastic in the form of granules to be used by plastic processing companies with injection moulding and compression moulding machines or to produce films for industrial packaging applications. Project Objectives within the Women TechEU program are: the optimization of the bioplastic formulation to assess its machinability with industrial machines; the material certifications (bioplastic material; compostability; material in contact with food); the study and design the wastewater treatment system inherent to the SP-Milk production process and the layout of a industrial scale plant.