The growing consumption and consequent waste of plastic products is a factor of great concern at economic, environmental, and social level. Health and food safety, and environmental and legislative requirements have been the driving force for the adoption of alternatives that allow the preservation of packaged content and monitoring its condition over time, enhancing consumer safety and confidence in the package.

The SMASUS project aims to develop intelligent, functional, and sustainable plastic packaging for medicines and food supplements, using active and functional coating solutions and sensing for maintenance / conservation of its shelf-life and monitoring of product condition inside the packaging. It is intended to raise awareness of the end-user, not only for the good storage of these products, but also to enhance the shelf-life of perishable products even when they are temporarily not under ideal storage conditions, which may not effectively imply significant degradation of product quality.

With this project, the consortium aims to create a range of smarter and more sustainable packaging in terms of production process, logistics chain, and storage, contributing to the mitigation of a global problem related with product recyclability, and boosting the regional and national economy.

Main goals

1. Development of eco-sustainable functional coatings with improved barrier performance to external factors, as oxygen, humidity, UV radiation, among others, and higher moisture absorption capacity to replace current silica gels.  to be applied on the packaging (sleeve or interior);

2. Development of an active monitoring solution using bioindicators for relative humidity determination in packaging desiccants, mainly silica gel;

3. Development of a passive monitoring solution of environmental conservation conditions, using directly printed sensors into the sleeves to quantify physical parameters (temperature and UV radiation);

4. Development of packaging with optimized design and ergonomics, increasing its value by the end-user, and thus improving its usability.

Project Number: POCI-01-0247-FEDER-047007; LISBOA-01-0247-FEDER-047007

Approval date: 30 March 2021

Project Duration: April 2021 to June 2023

Total Eligible Cost: 888 278.71 €

Financial Support EU: FEDER – 561 842.31 €

Project Type: SI I&DT Empresarial – Copromoção

Intervention Region: Lisbon, Centre and North of Portugal