Encapsulation of Essential Oils for the Development of Biosourced Pesticides with Controlled Release: A Review

Essential oil (EO) encapsulation can be carried out via a multitude of techniques, depending on applications. Because of EOs' biological activities, the development of biosourced pesticides with EO encapsulation is of great interest. A lot of methods have been developed; they are presented in this review, together with the properties of the final products. Encapsulation conserves and protects EOs from outside aggression, but also allows for controlled release, which is useful for applications in agronomy. The focus is on the matrices that are of interest for the controlled release of their content, namely: alginate, chitosan, and cyclodextrin. Those three matrices are used with several methods in order to create EO encapsulation with different structures, capacities, and release profiles.