Research Article Production of Pectin-Cellulose Biofilms: A New Approach for Citrus Waste Recycling Veronika Bátori, Mostafa Jabbari, Dan Åkesson, Patrik R. Lennartsson, Mohammad J. Taherzadeh, and Akram Zamani Swedish Centre for Resource Recovery, University of Bor˚ as, 50190 Bor˚ as, Sweden Correspondence should be addressed to Veronika B´ atori; veronika.batori@hb.se Received 24 July 2017; Revised 23 September 2017; Accepted 28 September 2017; Published 29 October 2017 Academic Editor: Arthur J. Ragauskas Copyright © 2017 Veronika B´ atori et al. his is an open access article distributed under the Creative Commons Attribution License, which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited. While citrus waste is abundantly generated, the disposal methods used today remain unsatisfactory: they can be deleterious for ruminants, can cause soil salinity, or are not economically feasible; yet citrus waste consists of various valuable polymers. his paper introduces a novel environmentally safe approach that utilizes citrus waste polymers as a biobased and biodegradable ilm, for example, for food packaging. Orange waste has been investigated for bioilm production, using the gelling ability of pectin and the strength of cellulosic ibres. A casting method was used to form a ilm from the previously washed, dried, and milled orange waste. Two ilm-drying methods, a laboratory oven and an incubator shaker, were compared. FE-SEM images conirmed a smoother ilm morphology when the incubator shaker was used for drying. he tensile strength of the ilms was 31.67 ± 4.21 and 34.76 ± 2.64 MPa, respectively, for the oven-dried and incubator-dried ilms, which is within the range of diferent commodity plastics. Additionally, biodegradability of the ilms was conirmed under anaerobic conditions. Films showed an opaque appearance with yellowish colour. 1. Introduction Plastics production has increased enormously in the past 100 years, and a global production of 322 million tons was reported by Statista [1] for 2015. his vast number of plastic products caused severe plastic pollution by now and they are typically made from nonrenewable sources. On the contrary, bioplastics are made from renewable sources or they are biodegradable; in the best-case scenario, they are both. Today, biopolymers are produced from cultivated crops; however, the land used for bioplastic is still negligible [2]. An example for a biobased and biodegradable material that is built up of diferent biopolymers, with no land use, is citrus waste. Citrus waste is a globally abundant and environmentally challenging waste that is underutilized [3]. Among citrus fruits, sweet oranges are the most commonly grown tropical fruits worldwide [4]. USDA [5] forecasted 45.8 million tons of sweet orange production for 2015/16. Industrial orange processing, for example, orange juice pro- duction generates about 50–60% residue of the original mass of the orange [6]. his vast quantity of waste is high in organic matter content (approx. 95% of total solids) and water (approx. 80–90%) and has a low pH (3-4) and inappropriate handling could cause severe damage to the environment [6]. Orange waste also contains pectin, soluble sugars, hemi- celluloses, cellulose, starch, protein, lignin, ash, fat, and lavonoids [7, 8], which have been shown to be beneicial to many yet imperfect disposal and recovery applications [6]. hese compounds on the other hand could be interesting for bioplastics applications. Orange waste has already been applied as a reinforcement in petrochemical or biobased matrices [9–11]. In all of these cases, the authors reported increased mechanical properties of the products compared to the neat polymer. he increased mechanical properties are most probably the direct efect of the present cellulosic ibres. However, pectin, the major component of orange peel, seems to have no signiicant efect in the above-mentioned composites. Nevertheless, pectin-based composites have been prepared with diferent reinforcing substances [12] and cellulosic plant ibres have Hindawi International Journal of Polymer Science Volume 2017, Article ID 9732329, 9 pages https://doi.org/10.1155/2017/9732329