Abstract
Recently, anti-microbial finishing of cellulosic based material gain interest from both scientific and industrial point of view. Anti-microbial food packaging is a system that is able to kill or inhibit the growth of microorganisms contaminating with foods. Direct contact of antimicrobial food packaging fabrics with incubated foodstuff inhibit the growth of microorganism to large extend. This would increase the shelf life of foods and decrease the risk of food borne illness. In this work, jute fabrics were functionalized to provide permanent bioactivity for packaging and storage application especially for grains and legumes was develop and investigated. Swatches from the scoured jute fabrics were treated separately with chitosan (1 % aqueous solution) (substrate I), chitosan and neem extract (substrate II), triclosan (substrate III) and reactive cyclodextrin (R-CD) followed by neem extract (substrate IV). Treated and untreated fabrics were monitored for antibacterial and anti-anthropoids properties. Results obtained showed that, jute fabrics treated with chitosan and neem extract exhibit antibacterial activity towards both S. aureus and E. Coli compared with the untreated one. Moreover, untreated jute fabric did not shows any deterrent effect toward Callosobruchus maculates, whereas all treatments show a sharp decrement in average number of hatching eggs and average number of adults after 7 days of incubation but with different degree. Higher decrement in average number of hatching eggs and adults was observed when jute fabrics treated with a chitosan in the presence of neem (substrate II) and those fabrics treated with R-CD in the presence of neem (substrate IV) were used as packaging for cowpea. The deterrent effect reached to 100 % against Callosobruchus maculates.