Abstract
Food packaging is critical for ensuring food safety, quality, and shelf life. However, growing environmental concerns with conventional plastics drive the search for sustainable alternatives. A major challenge is that many biobased and biodegradable materials show poor barrier properties, limiting their use for food. This study provides a proof-of-concept for classifying sustainable packaging materials by clustering oxygen transmission rate (OTR) and water vapor transmission rate (WVTR) data. A dataset from 49 studies (2000 to 2016) was analyzed using K-Means, Gaussian Mixture Model (GMM), and Density-Based Spatial Clustering of Applications with Noise (DBSCAN). DBSCAN emerged as best performing algorithm, achieving the highest Silhouette Score (0.910) and lowest Davies-Bouldin Index (0.374). Results validated that while many sustainable films exhibit high permeability, nanocomposites achieved improved barrier performance. This data-driven framework demonstrates clustering as a tool for systematic grouping of packaging materials, with future work requiring broader datasets, industrial benchmarks, and standardized reporting for practical application.
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Data availability
Raw data source from Lentschat study can access via CIRAD open access portal https://dataverse.cirad.fr/dataset.xhtml?persistentId=doi:10.18167/DVN1/U7HK8J Processed data can be accessed in supplementary Table 4.
Code availability
Processed dataset package is available and code can be accessed via GitHub repository https://github.com/whps0620/Food-Pack-Mapper/tree/main and in supplementary material.
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Acknowledgements
This research was part of the Sector Plan Engineering II, funded by the Dutch ministry of Education, Culture, and Science (OCW). The authors would also like to thank Anique Peppelman and Yizhou Ma for the insightful discussions and feedback that greatly enriched the research.
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D.T. conceptualized the study and did the project administration; D.T. performed the investigation, T.Y.Y. developed the methodology, and executed the model; D.T developed the paper concept and T.Y.Y., D.T. wrote the original draft of the paper; T.Y.Y. did the visualization; D.T. performed critical review and editing.
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Yeh, T.Y., Turan, D. Mapping gas permeability of sustainable packaging materials to link food barrier needs by clustering algorithms. npj Sci Food (2026). https://doi.org/10.1038/s41538-026-00741-7
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1038/s41538-026-00741-7
