Turkey based university is seeking industrial partners for its greenhouse cover formed by incorporation of multi functional halloysite nanotubes loaded with pesticide-pheromone materials to manufacture the cover or raw material and test the performance

Synthetic pesticides used in conventional agriculture have significant impact on public health and environmental safety due to their vast amount of uncontrolled and indiscriminate use. Although there is a worldwide decreasing trend in pesticide use, it was reported that the annual pesticide consumption in Turkey has increased 270% between the years of 1979-2000.Synthetic pesticides accumulate on food products causing acute or long-term chronicle symptoms in consumers. Therefore, the use of excess amount of pesticides has been a critical public health issue in the past decades. Considering the fact that insecticides are the most commonly used preparates 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. As far as the insecticides are concerned, the prior controlled insecticide release formulations usually target soil or foliar applications. Although it helps reduce the indiscriminate use of insecticides, the chemicals still interact with food products. The technology proposes an alternative formulation to reduce the health related issues of conventional insecticides, where the chemical is loaded on natural nanotubes that is incorporated into greenhouse cover films and released in a controlled manner. Greenhouse cover films are usually polyethylene or polycarbonate based materials that mainly aims heat retention inside the greenhouse. In the proposed invention, naturally occurring nanotubes halloysite nanotubes (HNTs) were incorporated into polyethylene film that possesses controlled insecticide release functionality. Here, controlled release is achieved by loading commercially available insecticide deltamethrin inside HNTs under vacuum environment. Followed by insecticide loading, HNTs were compounded with linear low-density polyethylene (LLDPE) beads. The resulting compound was extruded via a blown film extrusion line to obtain the greenhouse cover film.