Xperimenta 2024

Every year, the University of Aveiro organizes XPERIMENTA, an exciting science fair dedicated to high school students. This year's event took place on May 2 and 3 and offered a host of hands-on activities lasting around an hour, spread across different departments at the university.

We had the pleasure of presenting our activity over the two days, involving 14 groups of students and one teacher. The experiment we proposed concerned the biodegradation of plastics. Students exposed fuel-based, biobased plastic granules to white rot fungi. They were able to observe the different rates of biodegradation, with biobased plastics degrading faster than fuel-based ones.

The experiment highlighted the importance of the plastics industry's transition to biobased materials, a crucial step towards a more sustainable future.