1. lessa

    lessa New Member

    Joined:
    Oct 24, 2007
    Messages:
    1,916
    Likes Received:
    29
    Location:
    Fantasy land

    this is interesting and good news

    Discussion in 'The Lounge' started by lessa, May 25, 2008.

    WCI student isolates microbe that lunches on plastic bags
    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.
     
  2. Gone Wishing

    Gone Wishing New Member

    Joined:
    May 1, 2008
    Messages:
    1,045
    Likes Received:
    13
    Location:
    Australia
    It's certainly an interesting development, I'll be curious to see how it all pans out. The one question that I would ask is why these micro-organisms are uncommon in nature, and what other materials they would degrade in abundance - though the idea is to use them in isolation.
     
  3. Torana

    Torana Contributor Contributor

    Joined:
    Mar 13, 2007
    Messages:
    9,639
    Likes Received:
    131
    my thoughts are the same as Gone's actually. It definitely is a most interesting concept though...I am most interested in seeing how it goes in the future....
     
  4. Domoviye

    Domoviye New Member

    Joined:
    Jan 8, 2007
    Messages:
    1,368
    Likes Received:
    23
    Location:
    Proud Canadian. Currently teaching in Nanjing, Chi
    Cool. This is something that should definitely be supported.
     
  5. ValianceInEnd

    ValianceInEnd Active Member

    Joined:
    Oct 20, 2007
    Messages:
    1,667
    Likes Received:
    11
    Location:
    Phoenix, Arizona.
    Wow, just a kid with an idea. Very impressive man. This is really, really cool. I wanna go solve problems in the environment now... :rolleyes:
     
  6. rustyslacker

    rustyslacker New Member

    Joined:
    May 25, 2008
    Messages:
    5
    Likes Received:
    0
    Hey, that is pretty cool. It'll be interesting to see if/how this can be applied in everyday life, not just industrial areas.
     
  7. Fragger

    Fragger New Member

    Joined:
    Jan 30, 2008
    Messages:
    24
    Likes Received:
    0
    I've seen that. Been used in the malls were I live for like 4 years. Hahah... Good times when I just stood there for hours looking at the plastic bag in the dirt.
     
  8. Rumpole40k

    Rumpole40k Banned

    Joined:
    Apr 30, 2008
    Messages:
    7,283
    Likes Received:
    54
    Location:
    Paradise City, Street of the Gods
    I'm impressed. At his age my mind was everywhere but the environment.
     
  9. Crazy Ivan

    Crazy Ivan New Member

    Joined:
    Dec 26, 2006
    Messages:
    1,291
    Likes Received:
    11
    Location:
    The dumpster behind your McDonalds.
    Aww, man....if this turns out to be fake, I'll be so ticked.
     
  10. mammamaia

    mammamaia nit-picker-in-chief Contributor

    Joined:
    Nov 21, 2006
    Messages:
    19,150
    Likes Received:
    1,034
    Location:
    Coquille, Oregon
    nice, but i'd have sci-fi nightmares about this microbe becoming airborne and attacking plastic all over the place... just picture everything in your life that has any plastic parts in it, suddenly starting to dissolve!... there's probably a couple of b-movies out there on it already...
     
  11. Aurora_Black

    Aurora_Black New Member

    Joined:
    Apr 12, 2008
    Messages:
    622
    Likes Received:
    10
    Thats an amazing accomplishment, man heres a year older than me and only the word microbes de-activates my brain.. Pretty Impressive

    Im also a bit annoyed at how 60+ year old economic geniuses don't figure out the simple things like said plastic bags >< What are they doing!
     
  12. Cogito

    Cogito Former Mod, Retired Supporter Contributor

    Joined:
    May 19, 2007
    Messages:
    36,161
    Likes Received:
    2,827
    Location:
    Massachusetts, USA
    Mutant 59: The Plastic Eaters - Gerry Davis and Kit Pedlar (1972)
    Pretty awful book, in my opinion. I read it when it first came out.
     

Share This Page

  1. This site uses cookies to help personalise content, tailor your experience and to keep you logged in if you register.
    By continuing to use this site, you are consenting to our use of cookies.
    Dismiss Notice