16 year old boy figures out how to biodegrade plastic bags

Articles — By forcechange on May 28, 2008 6:28 am

By now it is common knowledge that plastic bags have a substantial environmental impact.  However, according to this article, an 11^th grade student in Ottawa named Daniel Burd, may have changed this fact.  Apparently, Burd, through work on his science project, discovered that plastic bags can actually be at least partially biodegraded in a matter of months, when exposed to bacteria under the right conditions. 

The Record newspaper, based out of Ontario, describes Burd’s efforts as follows:

First, he ground plastic bags into a powder. Next, he used ordinary household chemicals, yeast and tap water to create a solution that would encourage microbe growth. To that, he added the plastic powder and dirt. Then the solution sat in a shaker at 30 degrees.

After three months of upping the concentration of plastic-eating microbes, Burd filtered out the remaining plastic powder and put his bacterial culture into three flasks with strips of plastic cut from grocery bags. As a control, he also added plastic to flasks containing boiled and therefore dead bacterial culture.

Six weeks later, he weighed the strips of plastic. The control strips were the same. But the ones that had been in the live bacterial culture weighed an average of 17 per cent less.

Additionally, under a second iteration of his experiment, Burd was able to decrease the weight of the plastic by 32%.  According to the article, Burd’s discovery does have the potential to be applied in the real world.  And to boot, Burd took home $30,000 in prizes and scholarship awards from the science fair.

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