Green tea is one of the most frequently consumed drinks around the world. Some researchers proved that it has strong antioxidant and antibacterial activities due to its abundant content of polyphenols. However, the consumptions of tea products resulted in plenty of tea leaves as a by-product, in which mainly composed of cellulose. Cellulose is a plentiful biopolymer that is found in the wide spectrum of living organisms and is a common left-over from many manufacturing processes in the food industry. The fact that cellulose is a polysaccharide that has strong inter- and intra-molecular hydrogen bonds makes it very difficult to be dissolved in most of the solvents. Due to its properties including low cost, renewability, high mechanical strength, using the correct chemical modifying procedure and suitable solvent could help recycling cellulose and use it for other food applications, such as drug delivery system, filtration, immobilization, and packaging. Electrospinning is one of the novel technologies producing nanofibers by the electrical force. Depends on the high-voltage power supply, electric field builds up to a point where electrical force overwhelms the surface tension of the polymer solution making the fluid droplet travels in path mimicking Taylor cone and landed on the collector as fibers or beads. In this work, tea leaf rich in cellulose will be chosen as based material to encapsulated antimicrobial compounds and then processed into antimicrobial film using electrospinning method. The effectiveness of using electrospun cellulose fibers as part of food packaging for extending the food shelf life would be studied. In this work, used tea leafs were mixed with NaOH/urea aqueous system, ground, and derivatized to dissolve cellulose for electrospinning. Scanning electron microscopic images would show that the microstructure and continuity of the produced fibers. Fourier-transformed infrared spectroscopy and thermogravimetric analysis results confirmed successfulness of antimicrobial incorporation in the film structure. The antimicrobial efficacies and its antioxidant capacity were studied using in vitro assays. Upon all of the results, electrospinning method could successfully convert used tea leaf into an antimicrobial film that demonstrates a more economical and environmental friendly mean to reuse agricultural processing waste. This work will open up a new area for recycling of other manufacturing waste that has similar properties.

Converting used tea leaf into active antimicrobial films using electrospinning method

254th National Meeting (2017)

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