Studies of different degradation method on food packaging plastics

Abstract

In this era, researchers have conducted studies to investigate that there are many fungal species that have the ability to degrade plastics or known as biodegradation, especially on plastic wastes that caused pollution in rivers, oceans and others. This method was proposed initially to reduce the amount of plastic waste degraded through pyrolysis that have been done to burn off the plastics and this causes side effects due to combustion, especially toxic gases released to air which late r causes acid rain, global warming and henceforth. Therefore, this study specifically highlights the potential of y Pleurotus ostreatus as one of the fungi that is capable of enhancing the effectiveness of biodegradation which is a green-friendly approach to degrade plastics than to combust plastics. In this study, plastic food packaging plastics were selected namely Polystyrene (PS), Polyethylene Terephthalate (PET) and Polypropylene (PP) as the samples for this degradation study. Through this study, several analysis were made to examine the degradation of the plastics such as the weight loss, the surface morphology, the changes in chemical structure and the tensile properties such as tensile strength and modulus elasticity. The set of duration for this research was 90 days of experimenting. Polypropylene (PP) shows the greatest results as compared to the other plastic samples, such as higher percentage of weight loss, greater number of surface alterations such as the formation of pits and cracks, greater tensile strength reduction and the highest increment of modulus elasticity. This was achieved due to the chemical structure of Polypropylene (PP), which is a linear carbon chain, and thus the bonds between the carbon were easier to breakdown as compared to Polystyrene (PS) and Polyethylene Terephthalate (PET) which, both have the similar characteristics in terms of aromatic carbon chain or the phenol group which was harder to breakdown.