Bio-Friendly Edible Cutlery- An Effective Alternative to Plastic Disposable Cutlery

Abstract

Most of the Pakistani citizens have been using non-biodegradable utensils which take hundreds of year to decay into environment, polluting both the landfills and the water. To avoid use of such non-biodegradable material, edible cutlery has been developed in the current study with all-natural ingredients i.e. the blend of rice, sorghum and millets. Different flour blends were analyzed for functional properties. Water holding capacity (WHC) for Blend A, Blend B and Blend C were found to be 47.70 ± 1.120, 45.97 ± 0.950 and 44.33 ± 0.587, respectively. Oil Binding Capacity (OBC) values for three blends ranged from 135.16 ± 2.31, 102.76 ± 1.078 and 101.03 ± 0.896 for blend A, blend B and blend C respectively. Blend A shows the highest values of solvent retention capacity (SRC) for all three set of solutions i.e. 45.8±0.28 for sucrose, 46.0±0.0 for lactic acid and 44.6±0.5 for sodium carbonate than the other two blends. The Blend A was selected for the formation of product as more retro-gradation during baking led to a product of high tensile strength which is a demanded feature in the edible cutlery as well as the sensory analysts recommended the sample A on the basis of overall acceptability. The edible cutlery is found to contain 2.68%, 1.75%, 1.82%, 4.7% and 0.8% per cent moisture, ash, crude fat, crude protein and crude fiber respectively. The proximate analytical values obtained are found to be in acceptable limits, making the newly developed edible cutlery acceptable. Sheets used for preparing edible cutlery were cut into pieces and the samples of sheets were buried into the sterile soil were degraded completely in sterile soil within 5 to 7 days. The cutlery made in this study is found to be delicious, healthy as well an environmental friendly, and will be able to cut down the use of plastic and thus reducing the heaps of chemically toxic compounds released into the environment during its degradation.