Abstract
Accumulation of plastics and their resistance to being degraded naturally has caused different problems of pollution and accumulation at a global level, it is estimated that only 9% of the plastics produced annually are used or recycled correctly, which causes the other discarded percentage of these to generate negative impacts on the life and health of people and fauna on the planet. Expanded polystyrene (EPS) is one of the many resistant plastic materials and therefore very difficult to manage its disposal and be degraded due to its high molecular weight. About 4.8 and 12.7 million tons of EPS are discarded annually worldwide, and it is vitally important to find sustainable alternatives for their treatment. This work evaluates the degradation of medium-density EPS sheets using crude enzymatic extracts obtained from the filamentous fungus Aspergillus niger, using Manihot esculenta (cassava) peels, an unused agro-industrial and culinary waste, as a substrate for their cultivation. The polymer samples were pretreated and then put in contact with the enzyme extract for a period of 30 days. The results show an average degradation of 2.12%, indicating a high degradation in the studied sheets with structural losses evident under the microscope, suggesting that a longer exposure time could increase the percentage of degradation.
