BORN, short for BiObased theRmal-resistaNt food packaging, started on 1 October 2025 and is coordinated by the Italian National Research Council (grant agreement 101223095). In its first year the consortium worked on material design and development, processing, characterisation, sustainability and end of life, and identified promising directions for further development and optimisation. Its approach follows the whole life cycle of a package, from material design through production and use to end of life, which is the sequence that food manufacturers, packers and waste operators each see only in part. The partners include Fraunhofer IME and ITEM, the Royal Institute of Technology in Sweden, Poznań University of Technology, the University of Naples Federico II, a Spanish company working on packaging for agri-food products, a Swiss innovation hub and a Swiss sustainability consultancy.

The project also received an EIC Booster grant of EUR 50,000 to strengthen the exploitation and innovation potential of its research, and it belongs to an EIC Pathfinder portfolio on nature-inspired alternatives for food packaging and agricultural films, in which six projects were selected from 105 proposals. For packers and food brands, the technical limit that BORN targets is the main reason why bio-based materials remain rare in demanding applications, so progress there determines how far packaging can follow circularity requirements. The press release reports no performance data yet, and the second year will develop and assess the most promising materials.

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