While I am delighted for Daniel Burd...why on earth was he the first person to come up with this?
To DailyKos readers the problems of plastic pollution are not new - it sits in landfills for millenia. Floats in the ocean and animals eat it or get caught in it and drown.
The slurry of chemicals from degrading plastic hurts human health, animal health, and soil and ocean health.
Well Daniel was sick and tired of it and came up with a solution for his science fair project.
Take a look...
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.
The article continues describing his pretty simple methodology...
After figuring out which naturally occurring bacteria was doing the decomposing he concentrated the solution and ended up getting more than 40% degradation in six weeks!
It ends up he was the first person to do this!
But thankfully this guy has vision
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."
I hope this kid makes a mint and changes the earth's ecology.