Science whizkid makes plastic biodegradable

16-Year-Old Canadian Discovers Microbes That Cause Polyethylene 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% 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 decompose
polystyrene, but as far as Burd and his teacher Mark Menhennet know—and they’ve looked—
Burd’s research on polyethylene 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 polyethylene 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

Article
View