Teenager's Science Fair Project May Deliver Us From Plastic

[Natorgator]

Link

I bought groceries at Trader Joe's the other day. As anyone who has ever shopped there knows, Trader Joe's is full of incredibly attractive, cheap food, which, if you manage to make it through all the plastic packaging it comes in, you can actually eat. Unfortunately, by the time I started cooking I had more or less lost my appetite, since every time I discarded one of those packages I felt like I dropped another circle in hell.

So I pretty much love Daniel Burd right now. The 16-year-old from Waterloo, Ontario, as part of a science fair project, figured out a way to break down the polymers in plastic bags—compounds that can last for over 1,000 years—in about three months. Essentially, Burd hypothesized that since the bags eventually do degrade, it must be possible to isolate and augment the degrading agents.

Turns out that it's not only possible, it's kind of easy. Burd combined ground polyethylene plastic bags, sodium chloride, dirt from a landfill (which theoretically contains the microorganisms that ultimately degrade the plastic) and a yeast mixture in shakers for four weeks at a consistent temperature of about 86 degrees. At the end of the month, he took a sample of that mixture and combined it with a new one, with the goal of increasing the overall concentration of microbes. After one more repetition, he put fresh plastic bags in his solution for six weeks. In the end, the plastic degraded nearly 20%. A little more filtering to figure out exactly which microbes were the most effective, and he upped the degradation rate to 32%. He concludes, "The process of polyethylene degradation developed in this project can be used on an industrial scale for biodegradation of plastic bags. As a result, this would save the lives of millions of wildlife species and save space in landfills."

So, will this really work? Has a teenager really found a way to rid us of one of our most persistent environmental problems? Who knows, but judges at the Canada-Wide Science Fair apparently agree that it's worth pursuing. They sent Burd home with $30,000 in awards and scholarships. You can read his final report (all six pages of it) here (.pdf).

Pretty nice breakthrough for a teenager!

[madd0ct0r]

Yeah, quite practical.

BUT

1) Fast degrading Bags are already common in British Supermarkets

2) There is also a move towards simply eliminating unnecessary packaging and replacing the remainder with recycled or compostable variants
- ie corn starch for clear windows and brown paper for bags.

Comparative carbon footprints would have to be compared I suppose.

This method could well be useful for other sources of plastic waste, but plastic bags are best just left at the checkout.

[Ace Pace]

Yeah, quite practical.

BUT

1) Fast degrading Bags are already common in British Supermarkets

2) There is also a move towards simply eliminating unnecessary packaging and replacing the remainder with recycled or compostable variants
- ie corn starch for clear windows and brown paper for bags.

Comparative carbon footprints would have to be compared I suppose.

This method could well be useful for other sources of plastic waste, but plastic bags are best just left at the checkout.

Have you forgotten about the huge amount of plastic bags already present in landfills?

[madd0ct0r]

touché

Would it be efficient to mass produce his culture and pump it over existing landfills?

The hyper specialised culture would not be able to compete with the existing one in the landfill (if it was more efficient it would have already supplanted it).

Also, there is a massive amount of plastic bags present but there is also massive amounts of just about everything else - would the lower concentration of plastic lower the efficiency of the process?

[CaptainChewbacca]

touché

Would it be efficient to mass produce his culture and pump it over existing landfills?

The hyper specialised culture would not be able to compete with the existing one in the landfill (if it was more efficient it would have already supplanted it).

Also, there is a massive amount of plastic bags present but there is also massive amounts of just about everything else - would the lower concentration of plastic lower the efficiency of the process?

We wouldn't want to just pour it on existing landfills, the chemical balance and conditions wouldn't be right. We could start pulling bags out and sticking them in fermenters, though.

[Darth Nostril]

If we're going to start digging up all the plastic we threw away wouldn't it make more sense to recycle it rather than destroy it, seeing as it is derived from a non renewable natural resource that we're using up at a frightening rate

[Kanastrous]

Larry Niven - forget in which story - mentioned a mutation in an fictional organism designed to with up oil slicks, that gave it a taste for polyethylene.

Pretty soon there wasn't much of the stuff left; the bugs were eating the bags right on the grocery store spindles.

I love it when reality catches up to literature.

[Sea Skimmer]

We wouldn't want to just pour it on existing landfills, the chemical balance and conditions wouldn't be right. We could start pulling bags out and sticking them in fermenters, though.

That would never make much sense though; it would take too much energy to dig through all that trash, sort out the plastic (and presumably recyclables) and then rebury everything else. You also might end up causing a methane gas explosion by accident if you hit a rich pocket.

[kc8tbe]

Our medical, computing, and military technologies (just to name a few) rely heavily on plastic. If plastic-eating bacteria become widespread, our modern society will be pretty much fucked. Think about that before you try to culture plastic-eating bacteria and introduce them to the ecosystem at large.

So far we've been lucky in that while plastic-eating bacteria do exist, they aren't very efficient and are thus out-competed by bacteria with more conventional energy sources. With the use of plastics becoming so widespread, though, it seems it's only a matter of time before bacteria evolve an efficient way of extracting energy from it. The good news is, this will probably happen one polymer at a time, giving us time to replace plastic with something inorganic.

[Enforcer Talen]

Larry Niven - forget in which story - mentioned a mutation in an fictional organism designed to with up oil slicks, that gave it a taste for polyethylene.

Pretty soon there wasn't much of the stuff left; the bugs were eating the bags right on the grocery store spindles.

I love it when reality catches up to literature.

Ringworld.

[darthdavid]

Larry Niven - forget in which story - mentioned a mutation in an fictional organism designed to with up oil slicks, that gave it a taste for polyethylene.

Pretty soon there wasn't much of the stuff left; the bugs were eating the bags right on the grocery store spindles.

I love it when reality catches up to literature.

Ringworld.

Well there's quite a lot of Ringworld so it could have both but I'm pretty sure that you're thinking of the bacteria that ate the superconductors off the ring and caused technological collapse...

[Enforcer Talen]

Thats possible. Its been years since Ive read it. The paragraph Im thinking of is how the ringworlders' original planet was falling apart, bacteria based on decay, and Wu (?) mentions that old earth had a similar problem, with plastic being eaten right off the shelf.

[darthdavid]

Thats possible. Its been years since Ive read it. The paragraph Im thinking of is how the ringworlders' original planet was falling apart, bacteria based on decay, and Wu (?) mentions that old earth had a similar problem, with plastic being eaten right off the shelf.

We'll I'll look it up later but it sounds like you're right. I don't remember that part of the scene but I do remember that Wu did talk about the how the Ringworlder's superconductor got decayed and that may well have been one of the things he talked about...

[Alyrium Denryle]

I have to say... regardless of whether or not this was too late to do much with, this kid did good science. Very good science, on a shoestring budget and he helped solve a real problem. We should send him thank you notes and recommend to any faculty at universities we might know to take him under their wing...

[Korvan]

I'm going to have to come out and say that I'm against biodegradable plastic. I'd much rather have the carbon present in the plastic locked back underground then have it released in the form of CO2 into the atmosphere.

The problem of waste plastic is largely one of aesthetics and convenience. It's unsightly to look at and does fill up landfills, but except for a few unfortunate animals who ingest some, it does little real environmental damage. I do feel that the CO2 released from the degradation is a much more serious problem. Natural degradation will eventually release the CO2, but on a real long time scale that its effects are minimized.

[Alyrium Denryle]

I'm going to have to come out and say that I'm against biodegradable plastic. I'd much rather have the carbon present in the plastic locked back underground then have it released in the form of CO2 into the atmosphere.

The problem of waste plastic is largely one of aesthetics and convenience. It's unsightly to look at and does fill up landfills, but except for a few unfortunate animals who ingest some, it does little real environmental damage. I do feel that the CO2 released from the degradation is a much more serious problem. Natural degradation will eventually release the CO2, but on a real long time scale that its effects are minimized.

Um, I am not sure what chemical process is used by bacteria to break down the plastic, but it is probably broken down into sugars and used by the bacteria more than it is released into the atmosphere, and the bacteria can probably be modified once we sequence them to do other things, like produce chemicals, medications, etc.

[Korvan]

I'm going to have to come out and say that I'm against biodegradable plastic. I'd much rather have the carbon present in the plastic locked back underground then have it released in the form of CO2 into the atmosphere.

The problem of waste plastic is largely one of aesthetics and convenience. It's unsightly to look at and does fill up landfills, but except for a few unfortunate animals who ingest some, it does little real environmental damage. I do feel that the CO2 released from the degradation is a much more serious problem. Natural degradation will eventually release the CO2, but on a real long time scale that its effects are minimized.

Um, I am not sure what chemical process is used by bacteria to break down the plastic, but it is probably broken down into sugars and used by the bacteria more than it is released into the atmosphere, and the bacteria can probably be modified once we sequence them to do other things, like produce chemicals, medications, etc.

Hmm, I'm probably assuming that the plastics are being aerobically metabolized which might not be the case. I keep forgetting us air breathers aren't the only game in town.

[Alyrium Denryle]

I'm going to have to come out and say that I'm against biodegradable plastic. I'd much rather have the carbon present in the plastic locked back underground then have it released in the form of CO2 into the atmosphere.

The problem of waste plastic is largely one of aesthetics and convenience. It's unsightly to look at and does fill up landfills, but except for a few unfortunate animals who ingest some, it does little real environmental damage. I do feel that the CO2 released from the degradation is a much more serious problem. Natural degradation will eventually release the CO2, but on a real long time scale that its effects are minimized.

Um, I am not sure what chemical process is used by bacteria to break down the plastic, but it is probably broken down into sugars and used by the bacteria more than it is released into the atmosphere, and the bacteria can probably be modified once we sequence them to do other things, like produce chemicals, medications, etc.

Hmm, I'm probably assuming that the plastics are being aerobically metabolized which might not be the case. I keep forgetting us air breathers aren't the only game in town.

Pretty much. And even if they are, a lot of the Carbon is being sequestered in the form of its cell wall, and in proteins. And any that is given off in celluar respiration can be sequestered through other means.