As jurisdictions across Canada take action to ban the use of landfill-clogging plastic bags, an Ontario high school student has discovered a way to break down the plastic in a matter of months. Daniel Burd, a 17-year-old student took home the top prize at the Canada-Wide Science Fair for his project. Burd’s hypothesis was that if plastic bags do eventually break down. It should be possible to isolate and concentrate the micro-organism responsible for the-decomposition, thus speeding up the process.
To test his hypothesis, Burd took a few soil samples from a local landfill and mixed them with polyethylene, the substance used to make plastic bags, as well as a solution to encourage bacterial growth. After concentrating the solution several times and incubating it for 12 weeks, Burd took the resulting bacterial culture and tested it on strips of polyethylene. After six weeks, the strips had lost more than 17 percent of their weight. Burd concluded that a combination of two types of bacteria was most effective at breaking down the polyethylene. After isolating these two bacteria, combining them with some sodium acetate and incubating the solution at 37°C, Burd was able to degrade the plastic by 43 percent in six weeks. He figures the solution would entirely break down plastic bags in a matter of three months.
