| TheRecord.com – CanadaWorld – WCI student isolates microbe that lunches on plastic bags Good for this kid. The over-riding question is how can he do it when professional researchers cannot? Seriously. Too busy working on Viagra clones is my guess. |
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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.
The kicker to the story is the comment that the other kids in the science fair did well too. Ha.
Found by Aric Mackey.
Way to go, Daniel! 🙂
wow wait till the disaster hits! wait till this escapes into the wild, i hope it needs something to act as a catalyst to help it break down plastic. If this thing gets loose in the wild (if it isnt already) it will overwhelm the planet.
look at everything made with plasitc, not look at it disintergrate………
sometimes solution can be just as bad as the problem………..
#2 Don’t worry about it. The two bacteria, especially pseudomonas, are quite common, and Googling found papers where others had found the synergy between the two bacteria.
The importance of this project is that he figured out how to make the bacteria work especially well in eating plastic bags, which slow down the degradation of bagged trash (trash bags keep water and bacteria away from the garbage). Applying a culture of these two bacteria to landfills could make them work much better, with less area needed for future trash.
I have always wondered about “plastic does not break down in the environment” since everything else made of petroleum does. Our roads would be filled with tire shavings if bugs didn’t consume those bits. We use petroleum eating bugs to clean up land based oil spills.
So–to me the real question is can these bugs clean up the Pacific Gyro and just how do you keep them from getting into the motherload of our remaining underground oil reserves? And with all that energy sitting there, how come oil bacteria isn’t well established there with their waste products seeping up out of the ground instead sitting there for millions of years??
“Mother nature has some splaining to do.”
Kudo’s to the kid. Shows why we need a moon shot for energy independence. What is waiting for someone to simply look at?
I’ll bet he found this microbe in his hockey bag. Phewwww!
Just what kids need these days, something eating through their bag of pot.
Another excuse for littering.
Put him on the Vista team!!