In 2024, South Dakota State University researchers turned banana peels into biodegradable film; it reached 31.3 MPa tensile strength and lost more than half its weight in moist soil within three weeks

That banana peel you tossed away this week? Food scientists at South Dakota State University have figured out how to turn that peel into something useful: a see-through, plastic-like film that degrades in soil in about a month. The researchers, Mominul Hoque and Srinivas Janaswamy, published a study in 2024 titled ‘Biodegradable Packaging Films From Banana Peel Fiber’ in the journal Sustainable Chemistry and Pharmacy that showed the film held up well enough in lab testing to be considered for real packaging use.

Why banana peels, and why now

Bananas are a major global crop. In fact, according to the Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations, bananas rank number four among the most consumed food crops in the world, in terms of volume, coming after rice, wheat, and maize. A crop this large also leaves behind plenty of peel when the fruit is eaten, juiced, or processed into products like chips and baby food. Srinivas Janaswamy, an associate professor of food chemistry, had already tried this approach for avocado skins, coffee grounds, and switchgrass.

From peel to plastic-like film

The process might sound like an experiment cooked up in a kitchen but performed in a laboratory. The paper states that the researchers began by grinding dried banana peels to form a coarse paste. This paste was subjected to chemical treatment for extracting the lignocellulosic fiber, the tough fiber found in plant cell walls. This fiber was refined, bleached, and formed into sheets, which were then allowed to dry. The result looked and felt much like plastic wrap, but it was made entirely from banana peel fiber.

The numbers behind the claim

The final film was found to have a tensile strength greater than 30 megapascals (a measure of the pulling force a material can withstand before it tears). The researchers mentioned that this strength level is sufficient to make the film a viable candidate for use in sack bags and other packaging applications that don't demand high flexibility. The film was also clear, which can matter because shoppers often want to see the food through the wrapper. The study also reports two separate biodegradation measures: the film had a half-life of about 15 to 21 days, and separately, lost more than half its weight within three weeks when kept in soil with 21 percent moisture, an ordinary damp-soil condition rather than an extreme one.

A plastic problem that keeps growing

Data from the UN Environment Programme shows the world today produces over 400 million tonnes of plastic each year, and a significant portion of it does not get recycled but is released into the environment. Conventional plastics do not have the characteristic of breaking down easily after being disposed of. If commercialized, a film that takes roughly one month to degrade, made out of what was being discarded anyway, could offer a modest solution.

What still needs to happen

What Hoque and Janaswamy have shown so far is that the banana peel film works well in lab conditions. This paper acknowledges that more work needs to be done to make the film more flexible and to verify its suitability for scale-up into commercial application. The film is not quite ready to wrap a loaf of bread or a bag of chips the way plastic does today, and those are precisely the next steps the research team says it intends to pursue. Even with those gaps, there is something appealing about a fix this simple. It doesn’t involve any rare or exotic materials, just organic fruit waste that already exists in massive amounts. If the film eventually proves scalable for wider packaging use, it's a plausible candidate to quietly work its way into everyday products, except that unlike conventional plastic, it disappears into the soil rather than sitting around for decades. For now, it’s just a promising first step, backed by real lab numbers, toward chipping away at how much plastic waste the world produces.