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Ecological footprint (EF) is an indicator that accounts for human demand in the environment compared with the sizes of the bio-productive land and sea areas. This research was carried out to determine the EF for environmental sustainability in Ilorin Metropolis. Empirical surveying, which involved systematic random sample technique, was used to select residential households in each community for this investigation. The EF indicators, which include food, energy and waste consumptions, were determined empirically. The bio-capacity (BC), ecological stress and deficit were determined, from the land used as environmental sustainable areas in Ilorin, using Google Earth Mapping. The results revealed that energy has the highest EF of 44%, followed by waste and food with the footprint of 25% and 5%, respectively. A deficit of 38% was obtained, and this requires eight times the BC to balance the EF of the population. This implies that people are consuming more of the energy and generating more wastes than they consumed food.

Background Packaging of locust beans is done to prevent deterioration and promote its shelf-life. This research was carried out to develop and evaluate a cocoyam starch-banana peels nanocomposite film for locust beans packaging. The film was prepared by gelatinizing a mixture of 0.36 g banana peels nanoparticles (~ 1.14–1.64 nm), 18 g cocoyam starch, and 18 ml glycerol in 300 ml distilled water at 90 °C. The thermal, structural, mechanical and barrier properties of the film were determined using standard procedures. A 100 g of the locust beans condiment was packaged using the film and compared with packaging in a low-density polyethylene (LDPE) at 5.16–7.58 pH and 16.67–11.50% moisture ranges. Results Results indicate approx. 3% weight loss with an increase in temperature (≤ 250 °C). The heat of decomposition in the process was 4.64 J/g, which depended on the transition temperature. Also, the film has high stiffness and creep along the line of topography in the atomic force imaging. The material permeates more to CO2 (27%) and H2 (67%) but has a low O2 (4%) and N2 (1%) gas permeabilities. The size of particles in the film was in the range of 3.52–3.92 nm, which is distributed across its matrix to create the pores needed to balance the gases in the micro-atmosphere. The microbial load of the locust beans decreased with pH and increased with moisture, but this was generally lower compared to those packaged in the LDPE at p < 0.05. Conclusions The film was a better packaging material than the LDPE since it recorded lower counts of the microbes throughout the storage. Thus, the nanocomposite film was effective in controlling the microbial growth of the locust beans irrespective of the sample moisture and pH over the 30 days packaging duration.