Will a 16 year old science fair winner save us all from plastic pollution?

Will a 16 year old science fair winner save us all from plastic pollution?
by stillman
Wed May 28, 2008 at 02:14:35 PM PDT

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.

http://www.dailykos.com/story/2008/5/28/165620/139/427/524355

http://news.therecord.com/article/354044

mankind is doomed, we get a great story like this.

The smart kids among us will save the world. Thank God.

I hope he's well rewarded for his work!

and to follow up on getting an answer.

I wonder how many kinds of plastic this works on?

IF we use this method and reduce plastic consuption we could live a lot cleaner enviroment.

I've been to university seminars where that was the topic for years?

But good on the kid for figuring it out for himself. I'm sure that he could be a good contributor some day.

Will this require additional resources to be expended to produce new plastics?

So sounds back thermodynamically to me - and I figure global atmospheric CO2 is a bit more of a problem than landfill space these days.

I needed some good news today!

maybe they will get that floating island of plastic in the pacific.

I've always said we're going to have to rely on the kids to figure out our problems, because they don't accept the way things are.

But he's pretty smart for a kid, and certainly deserves that scholarship.