Rewards of experimentation...

Science whizkid makes plastic biodegradable

16-Year-Old Canadian Discovers Microbes That Cause Polyethelene To Decompose Faster

It’s pretty much common knowledge that plastic bags take 1000 years to decompose, if they do at all, but that fact just wasn’t good enough for 16-yearold Daniel Burd. He’s found a way to make plastic bags decompose in about three months by his estimation.
The Waterloo, Ontario, high school junior figured that something must make plastic degrade, even if it does take millennia, and that something was probably bacteria.
According to a report in the Waterloo Record, Burd mixed landfill dirt with yeast and tap water, then added ground plastic and let it stew. The plastic indeed decomposed more quickly than it would in nature; after experimenting with different temperatures and configurations, Burd isolated the microbial munchers. One came from the bacterial genus Pseudomonas, and the other from the genus Sphingomonas.
He was able to degrade 43 per cent of some plastic within six weeks.
Burd says this should be easy on an industrial scale: all that’s needed is a fermenter, a growth medium and plastic, and the bacteria themselves provide most of the energy by producing heat as they eat. The only waste is water and a bit of carbon dioxide.
The inputs are cheap, maintaining the required temperature takes little energy because microbes produce heat as they work, and the only outputs are water and tiny levels of carbon dioxide—each microbe produces only 0.01 per cent of its own infinitesimal weight in carbon dioxide, said Burd.
The young student’s accomplishment has not gone unnoticed. He won the top prize at the Canada-Wide Science Fair in Ottawa. This prize is prestigious as well as tangible. He received $10,000 as well as a $20,000 scholarship.Burd, a Grade 11 student at Waterloo Collegiate Institute, got the idea for his project from everyday life. “Almost every week I have to do chores and when I open the closet door, I have this avalanche of plastic bags falling on top of me,” he said. “One day, I got tired of it and I wanted to know what other people are doing with these plastic bags.”
The answer: not much. So he decided to do something himself.
A researcher in Ireland has uncovered the capability of pseudomonas to decomposs polystyrene, but as far as Burd and his teacher Mark Menhennet know—and they’ve looked—Burd’s research on polyethelene plastic bags is a first.
To see if his process would work on a larger scale, he tried it with five or six whole bags in a bucket with the bacterial culture. That worked too.
“This is a huge, huge step forward... We’re using nature to solve a man-made problem.” Burd would like to take his project further and see it in use. AGENCIES BACTERIA LUNCHES ON GROCERY BAGS
To help polyethelene decompose faster, Daniel Burd mixed a landfill dirt with yeast and tap water, then added ground plastic and let it stew
After experimenting with different temperatures and configurations, Burd isolated the microbial munchers. One came from the bacterial genus Pseudomonas, and the other from the genus Sphingomonas
It should be easy on an industrial scale: all that’s needed is a fermenter, a growth medium and plastic. The bacteria provide most of the energy by producing heat as they eat. The only waste from the procedure is H 2 0 and a bit of CO 2