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16-Year-Old Creates Solution to Decompose Plastic Bags
A brilliant 16-year-old has come up with a way to decompose plastic bags in a mere three months.
In The Graduate, when Mr. McGuire told young Benjamin Braddock that plastics were the future, he sure wasn’t wrong.
Plastics - and plastic bags, in particular - have a nasty habit of sticking around long after they’re wanted. A plastic bag can take as long as 1,000 years to decompose naturally - and given that we produce 500 billion of them each year, it seems likely our planet will soon become a swamp of plastic.
But there may be hope for us yet, thanks to the smart thinking of Daniel Burd, a 16-year-old boy from Waterloo, Ontario. Burd recently won $30,000 in scholarships and prize money at the Canada-Wide Science Fair for his groundbreaking environmental project: a solution that can biodegrade plastic bags in a mere three months.
Burd came up with the concept while working on household chores one day. “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 told The Record. “One day, I got tired of it.”
He spent weeks on a trial-and-error process to isolate a group of microorganisms that would quickly degrade plastic bags, and soon came up with a winning combination. “All you need is a fermenter . . . your growth medium, your microbes and your plastic bags.” We don’t pretend to understand it all, but if you’re curious, you can read his report (PDF) here.
His invention could easily be used for wider application, and may lead to a dramatic speedup in plastic back degradation the world over. “This is a huge, huge step forward,” he said. “We’re using nature to solve a man-made problem.”
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