Canadian Student May Have Found A Way to Decompose Plastic!

This is such cool news. Spe­cially if you’re a geek like me. :-) This is from RECORD​.COM.

Karen Kawawada
RECORD STAFF
WATERLOO

Get­ting ordi­nary plas­tic bags to rot away like banana peels would be an envi­ron­men­tal dream come true.

After all, we pro­duce 500 bil­lion a year world­wide and they take up to 1,000 years to decom­pose. They take up space in land­fills, lit­ter our streets and parks, pol­lute the oceans and kill the ani­mals that eat them.

Now a Water­loo teenager has found a way to make plas­tic bags degrade faster — in three months, he figures.

Daniel Burd’s project won the top prize at the Canada-Wide Sci­ence Fair in Ottawa. He came back with a long list of awards, includ­ing a $10,000 prize, a $20,000 schol­ar­ship, and recog­ni­tion that he has found a prac­ti­cal way to help the environment.

Daniel, a 16-year-old 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.

He knew plas­tic does even­tu­ally degrade, and fig­ured microor­gan­isms must be behind it. His goal was to iso­late the microor­gan­isms that can break down plas­tic — not an easy task because they don’t exist in high num­bers in nature.

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.

That wasn’t good enough for Burd. To iden­tify the bac­te­ria in his cul­ture, he let them grow on agar plates and found he had four types of microbes. He tested those on more plas­tic strips and found only the sec­ond was capa­ble of sig­nif­i­cant plas­tic degradation.

Next, Burd tried mix­ing his most effec­tive strain with the oth­ers. He found strains one and two together pro­duced a 32 per cent weight loss in his plas­tic strips. His the­ory is strain one helps strain two reproduce.

Tests to iden­tify the strains found strain two was Sphin­gomonas bac­te­ria and the helper was Pseudomonas.

A researcher in Ire­land has found Pseudomonas is capa­ble of degrad­ing 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.

Next, Burd tested his strains’ effec­tive­ness at dif­fer­ent tem­per­a­tures, con­cen­tra­tions and with the addi­tion of sodium acetate as a ready source of car­bon to help bac­te­ria grow.

At 37 degrees and opti­mal bac­te­r­ial con­cen­tra­tion, with a bit of sodium acetate thrown in, Burd achieved 43 per cent degra­da­tion within six weeks.

The plas­tic he fished out then was vis­i­bly clearer and more brit­tle, and Burd guesses after six more weeks, it would be gone. He hasn’t tried that yet.

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.

Indus­trial appli­ca­tion should be easy, said Burd. “All you need is a fer­menter … your growth medium, your microbes and your plas­tic bags.”

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.

“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 be used. He plans to study sci­ence at uni­ver­sity, but in the mean­time he’s busy with things such as stu­dent coun­cil, sports and music.

“Dan is def­i­nitely a tal­ented stu­dent all around and is poised to be a lead­ing sci­en­tist in our com­mu­nity,” said Men­hen­net, who led the school’s sci­ence fair team but says he only helped Burd with paperwork.

Other local stu­dents also did well at the national sci­ence fair.

Devin Howard of St. John’s Kil­marnock School won a gold medal in life sci­ence and sev­eral scholarships.

Macken­zie Carter of St. John’s Kil­marnock won bronze medals in the auto­mo­tive and engi­neer­ing categories.

Engi­neers With­out Bor­ders awarded Jeff Graansma of For­est Heights Col­le­giate a free trip to their national con­fer­ence in January.

Zach Elgood of Court­land Avenue Pub­lic School got hon­ourable men­tion in earth and envi­ron­men­tal science.