Plastic bags no longer a worry?

Dizzy has an interesting piece about the discovery by a 16-year-old Canadian by name of Daniel Burd of a way to decompose ordinary plastic bags in considerably less than the 100s of years cited by the green lobby. Through judicious use of a bacteria called Sphingomonas, along with a helper bacteria called Pseudomonas, polythene can completely degrade in about 3 months. The only ingredients, in Mr Burd’s own words, are “a fermenter… your growth medium, your microbes and your plastic bags”, the process requires little energy because the microbes produce heat as they work, and the only outputs are water and a minuscule quantity of CO2 (specifically, each microbe produces 0.01pc of its own body weight in CO2 throughout the process).

So instead of landfills and rough-handed punitive legislation, this young Canadian has developed a way for individual people to set up their own bacteria-powered plastic degrading plants. That’s what I call scientific research!

~ by Marius Ostrowski on June 23, 2009.