SuperForester Neal sent in this article a couple days ago that sent my head spinning! We all know that plastic bags are a major problem for our environment. Apart from the fact that they litter our streets and harm our wildlife, there is the daunting fact that 500 billion bags are produced per year worldwide and each of those take approximately 10-20 years to decompose.
Sixteen year old student, Daniel Burd, decided he would change this by setting out to isolate the microorganisms that are capable of breaking down plastic. And he did! He took 10-20 years and cut that down to approximately three months!
According to TheRecord.com,
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 percent less.
Several tests (and months) later, Burd was able to identify the bacteria responsible for the degredation as the Sphingomonas bacteria and that this bacteria was even more potent with the help of Pseudomonas.
The most promising part of Burd’s research is that he believes these tests should be easy to replicate at the 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.
For an interesting Daniel Burd interview, click here!
Excellent work, Daniel! SuperForest tips its hat to you, fine sir. I cannot wait to see what other amazing discoveries you make in your life journey.
And thank you, SuperForester Neal, for that amazing tip!
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