Another teenage environmental hero
Jun. 12th, 2009 09:52 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
pegkerrIt's not your average science fair when the 16-year-old winner manages to solve a global waste crisis. But such was the case at last month's Canadian Science Fair in Waterloo, Ontario [edited to add: guess that was last year's science fair], where Daniel Burd, a high school student at Waterloo Collegiate Institute, presented his research on microorganisms that can rapidly biodegrade plastic.
Daniel had a thought it seems even the most esteemed microbiology PhD's hadn't considered. Plastic, one of the most indestructible of manufactured materials, does in fact eventually decompose. It takes 1,000 years but decompose it does, which means there must be microorganisms out there to do the decomposing.
Could those microorganisms be bred to do the job faster?
That was Daniel's question which he put to the test by a very simple and clever process of immersing ground plastic in a yeast solution that encourages microbial growth, and then isolating the most productive organisms.
The preliminary results were encouraging, so he kept at it, selecting out the most effective strains and interbreeding them. After several weeks of tweaking and optimizing temperatures Burd was able to achieve a 43 percent degradation of plastic in six weeks, an almost inconceivable accomplishment.
Read more about Daniel's research here and more about the attention it has garnered here.
Daniel had a thought it seems even the most esteemed microbiology PhD's hadn't considered. Plastic, one of the most indestructible of manufactured materials, does in fact eventually decompose. It takes 1,000 years but decompose it does, which means there must be microorganisms out there to do the decomposing.
Could those microorganisms be bred to do the job faster?
That was Daniel's question which he put to the test by a very simple and clever process of immersing ground plastic in a yeast solution that encourages microbial growth, and then isolating the most productive organisms.
The preliminary results were encouraging, so he kept at it, selecting out the most effective strains and interbreeding them. After several weeks of tweaking and optimizing temperatures Burd was able to achieve a 43 percent degradation of plastic in six weeks, an almost inconceivable accomplishment.
Read more about Daniel's research here and more about the attention it has garnered here.