Greenhouse Plastic Film with Controlled Insecticide Release Functionality

Synthetic pesticides used in conventional agriculture and especially greenhouses have significant impact on public health and environmental safety due to their vast amount of uncontrolled and indiscriminate use. They accumulate on food products, causing acute or long-term chronic symptoms in consumers. Therefore, the excessive use of pesticides has been a critical public health issue in the past decades. 

These problems show that there is a need to find new ways that can help to reduce the use of pesticides in agricultural applications for better human health and better environment conditions. Considering the fact that insecticides are the most commonly used preparation among the commercial pesticides, this puts forward an ever increasing search to reduce the toxic effects, such as natural insecticides or alternative formulations of conventional insecticides. 

Conventional insecticides are applied directly into soil or foils of agricultural products. Therefore, the excess of any pesticide species are accumulated in soil or on products. This technology employs a different approach to agricultural practices in terms of insecticide use, in the form of a greenhouse plastic film with controlled insecticide release functionality.

The technology presents an alternative formulation to reduce the health related issues of conventional insecticides. Active ingredient is loaded into nanotubes and compounded into polymeric greenhouse films. The loaded greenhouse films release the active ingredient in a controlled manner. In this way, hazardous chemicals are not in contact with soil or agricultural products, and the excessive use of insecticides is prevented without losing fertile soil. It is superior to current state of the art due to the advantage of removing the insecticide chemicals from soil by integrating the controlled release formulation into greenhouse covering films. This technology helps to make greenhouse films more environment friendly by reducing risks of insecticide use.

This technology is applicable to polyethylene films for greenhouses, including:

• Greenhouse plastic films
• Fumigation films
• Low-tunnel greenhouse films
• Mulch films

The technology can also be incorporated into polyethylene masterbatch.

It is expected that the global commercial greenhouse market will be USD 32.31 billion with a compound annual growth rate of 8.8% by 2021. The largest product segments of the market fruit-vegetable growing greenhouses and flower-ornamental plant growing greenhouses and it is expected that these segments will remain the category leaders in future. The global agricultural films market by greenhouse films accounted for the largest share in terms of volume in 2016. This segment of the market was valued at 2,179.92 kilotons in 2016, and is expected to grow to 2,982.60 kilotons during the forecast period. This growth is expected because of the number of rising greenhouse structures across the world.

• Sustained, slow release of insecticide
• Hazardous chemicals are no longer in contact with soil or agricultural products 
• No fertility loss in soil
• Decreases the pesticide cost by preventing indiscriminate use of insecticides
• Greenhouse owners do not need to use extra insecticides for their products in the greenhouse
• Reduce or eliminate the need to store hazardous insecticides at workplaces and production fields