Archive for June, 2008
Students Make Clothing from old bags!
Thursday, June 26th, 2008A bunch of creative kids here!
http://video.nbc5i.com/player/?id=244428
teenager to save us all
Monday, June 9th, 2008WCI student isolates microbe that lunches on plastic bags
DAVID BEBEE, RECORD STAFF
May 22, 2008
Karen Kawawada
RECORD STAFF
kkawawada@therecord.com
WATERLOO
Getting ordinary plastic bags to rot away like banana peels would be an environmental dream come true.
After all, we produce 500 billion a year worldwide and they take up to 1,000 years to decompose. They take up space in landfills, litter our streets and parks, pollute the oceans and kill the animals that eat them.
Now a Waterloo teenager has found a way to make plastic bags degrade faster — in three months, he figures.
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.
First, he ground plastic bags into a powder. Next, he used ordinary household chemicals, yeast and tap water to create a solution that would encourage microbe growth. To that, he added the plastic powder and dirt. Then the solution sat in a shaker at 30 degrees.
After three months of upping the concentration of plastic-eating microbes, Burd filtered out the remaining plastic powder and put his bacterial culture into three flasks with strips of plastic cut from grocery bags. As a control, he also added plastic to flasks containing boiled and therefore dead bacterial culture.
Six weeks later, he weighed the strips of plastic. The control strips were the same. But the ones that had been in the live bacterial culture weighed an average of 17 per cent less.
That wasn’t good enough for Burd. To identify the bacteria in his culture, he let them grow on agar plates and found he had four types of microbes. He tested those on more plastic strips and found only the second was capable of significant plastic degradation.
Next, Burd tried mixing his most effective strain with the others. He found strains one and two together produced a 32 per cent weight loss in his plastic strips. His theory is strain one helps strain two reproduce.
Tests to identify the strains found strain two was Sphingomonas bacteria and the helper was Pseudomonas.
A researcher in Ireland has found Pseudomonas is capable of degrading polystyrene, but as far as Burd and his teacher Mark Menhennet know — and they’ve looked — Burd’s research on polyethelene plastic bags is a first.
Next, Burd tested his strains’ effectiveness at different temperatures, concentrations and with the addition of sodium acetate as a ready source of carbon to help bacteria grow.
At 37 degrees and optimal bacterial concentration, with a bit of sodium acetate thrown in, Burd achieved 43 per cent degradation within six weeks.
The plastic he fished out then was visibly clearer and more brittle, and Burd guesses after six more weeks, it would be gone. He hasn’t tried that yet.
To see if his process would work on a larger scale, he tried it with five or six whole bags in a bucket with the bacterial culture. That worked too.
Industrial application should be easy, said Burd. “All you need is a fermenter . . . your growth medium, your microbes and your plastic bags.”
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.”
Burd would like to take his project further and see it be used. He plans to study science at university, but in the meantime he’s busy with things such as student council, sports and music.
“Dan is definitely a talented student all around and is poised to be a leading scientist in our community,” said Menhennet, who led the school’s science fair team but says he only helped Burd with paperwork.
Other local students also did well at the national science fair.
Devin Howard of St. John’s Kilmarnock School won a gold medal in life science and several scholarships.
Mackenzie Carter of St. John’s Kilmarnock won bronze medals in the automotive and engineering categories.
Engineers Without Borders awarded Jeff Graansma of Forest Heights Collegiate a free trip to their national conference in January.
Zach Elgood of Courtland Avenue Public School got honourable mention in earth and environmental science.
http://news.therecord.com/article/354044
Q&A: Meet the Teen Science Whiz with the Plastic Bag Breakthrough
It may surprise you to learn that Daniel Burd does not consider himself an environmentalist. The Canadian teenager has become bit of an environmental hero over the past few days, as word of his potentially revolutionary science fair project has spread. In case you missed it, Burd managed to isolate the naturally occurring microbes that degrade plastic bags in landfills, cutting degradation time from lifetimes to mere months.
Maybe anyone could have done it, but no one else has. And that, says Burd, is part of what inspired him to pursue the project, which he started researching at the end of 2006. “As I began to research more and more, I found out we’re not doing too much,” he told me in a phone call from his home in Ontario. He is, in his words, “just a scientist trying to solve a huge problem.”
“In the end, all problems come back to us,” he says. “The plastic bags in the water, they don’t dissolve, and they attract hydrophobic chemicals. Fish or other organisms may eat polluted plastic bags, and then we have millions of marine animals dying. If they don’t die, then we may eat these fish, and then we have a statistical increase in healthcare problems directly attributable to that pollution. That’s why everybody should be concerned.”
“I would hope that through my project I’m able to, first of all, show a viable solution, economical and doable, and then get people more aware of it,” he says. “Then we can fix it.”
I wasn’t the first person to call Burd—far from it. Since news of his project broke, he says that his high school and the local newspaper have been fielding constant calls from journalists, scientists, and “concerned citizens,” all interested in what he’s going to do to make his discovery viable on an industrial scale. A scientist since he first planted a tomato seed to see if it would grow, Burd says he’s completely dedicated to pursuing the project and improving his method using some of his scholarship and prize money. For now, however, he’ll have to balance his continuing work with other obligations. Like, um, high school.Photo used under a Creative Commons license from Flickr user betoinorge.
—Casey Miner
http://www.motherjones.com/blue_marble_blog/archives/2008/05/8363_science_fair_wh.html
Teenager’s Science Fair Project May Deliver Us From Plastic
I bought groceries at Trader Joe’s the other day. As anyone who has ever shopped there knows, Trader Joe’s is full of incredibly attractive, cheap food, which, if you manage to make it through all the plastic packaging it comes in, you can actually eat. Unfortunately, by the time I started cooking I had more or less lost my appetite, since every time I discarded one of those packages I felt like I dropped another circle in hell.
So I pretty much love Daniel Burd right now. The 16-year-old from Waterloo, Ontario, as part of a science fair project, figured out a way to break down the polymers in plastic bags—compounds that can last for over 1,000 years—in about three months. Essentially, Burd hypothesized that since the bags eventually do degrade, it must be possible to isolate and augment the degrading agents.
Turns out that it’s not only possible, it’s kind of easy. Burd combined ground polyethylene plastic bags, sodium chloride, dirt from a landfill (which theoretically contains the microorganisms that ultimately degrade the plastic) and a yeast mixture in shakers for four weeks at a consistent temperature of about 86 degrees. At the end of the month, he took a sample of that mixture and combined it with a new one, with the goal of increasing the overall concentration of microbes. After one more repetition, he put fresh plastic bags in his solution for six weeks. In the end, the plastic degraded nearly 20%. A little more filtering to figure out exactly which microbes were the most effective, and he upped the degradation rate to 32%. He concludes, “The process of polyethylene degradation developed in this project can be used on an industrial scale for biodegradation of plastic bags. As a result, this would save the lives of millions of wildlife species and save space in landfills.”
So, will this really work? Has a teenager really found a way to rid us of one of our most persistent environmental problems? Who knows, but judges at the Canada-Wide Science Fair apparently agree that it’s worth pursuing. They sent Burd home with $30,000 in awards and scholarships. You can read his final report (all six pages of it) here (.pdf).
Photo used under a Creative Commons license from Arbel Egger.
—Casey Miner
http://www.motherjones.com/blue_marble_blog/archives/2008/05/8323_some_kid_invent.html