Plastic pollution is one of the major problems of our time. Plastic has been found almost everywhere in the world, from the Mariana Trench to Mount Everest. It has a negative impact on the ecosystem, as animals die because of plastic waste. It has also been proven that plastic is already present in human bodies. In the bachelor thesis, we tried to find a better process for the degradation of low-density polyethylene with white rot fungi. We used the fungi Pleurotus ostreatus and Ceriporiopsis subvermispora. We hypothesized that fungi break down plastic faster in the presence of lignin in the culture medium. Analytical balance, confocal microscope, SEM and FTIR spectroscopy were used for analysis. No weight loss was observed when weighing the LDPE film, most likely due to the attached mycelium and culture medium to the film. Using a confocal microscope, we measured the roughness parameter Sq, which represents the root square mean of the height. If we can trust the results, despite the high standard deviations, we found that the fungus Pleurotus ostreatus (Sq is 0.854 µm and the standard deviation is 0.350) after 30 days causes a greater roughness than the fungus Ceriporiopsis subvermispora (Sq is 0.678 µm and the standard deviation is 0.467). From this we can conclude that the fungus Pleurotus ostreatus breaks down plastic faster than Ceriporiopsis subvermispora. We were unable to confirm or reject the hypothesis, as the measurements were insufficiently precise to be confident in our results.
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