Photo:kables, Creative Commons, Flickr
A Canadian teen, working in his spare time, has discovered bacteria that will biodegrade plastic.
Daniel Burd, 16, of Waterloo, Ontario (Canada), has – after trial and error with a beaker, ground plastic, and a yeast culture made from water and household chemicals – found bacteria that happily digest plastic and excrete little more than water, carbon dioxide and a fair amount of heat, making his discovery useful not only as a means to get rid of all that ubiquitous plastic, but generate a little energy as well. (Foresee the day when household plastic digesters plug into a countertop socket and keep a light shining over the kitchen sink at night.)
The bacteria – actually two strains, pseudomonas and sphingomonas – work together to make plastic disappear, the first acting as a reproductive stimulant to the second. A similar discovery – that pseudomonas can biodegrade polystyrene – also occurred in Ireland, but Burd’s work is the first that shows similar effects on the common, household plastic bag, made from polyethylene.
The surprising part of this discovery is that it’s essentially nothing new. Scientists have known for some time that many pseudomonads are capable of degrading a variety of compounds. Certain variations of this aerobic bacteria can even degrade naphthalene. Why, then, does it take a Canadian teenager working on a budget of less than $100 to make greater strides than labs with million-dollar budgets who could be commercializing this process? Particularly when getting plastic bags to disappear would be one of the environmental highlights of the 21st century?
Why? Because there’s no money in getting rid of plastic. Or at least very little money compared to developing commercially desirable but potentially dangerous remedies for such non-critical health issues as toenail fungus and wrinkles. Never mind that the Great Pacific Garbage Patch, created by an ocean vortex from the world’s trash (mainly plastic bags), is now twice the size of the continental United States. Or that the slowly degrading plastic is harming aquatic environments by entering the food chain as “nurdles” (tiny pieces of plastic) and affecting reproductive and developmental functions all the way up the chain to humans.
Burd won top prize at Canada-Wide Science Fair in Ottawa, and a list of rewards that include a $10,000 prize, a $20,000 scholarship and recognition for his accomplishment. Hopefully, a plastics manufacturing firm like Better Packages, Inc. – an innovator in the plastic bag field – will take the discovery and run with it, providing American consumers with an affordable, chemically rechargeable plastic bag biodegrader that sits on a counter or tabletop and quietly disposes of all those plastic bags we accumulate.
There are some dangers, of course. Both pseudomonas and sphingomonas play a role in human disease. The former is often implicated in patients with immune deficiencies, while the latter usually crops up as a nosocomial (hospital-acquired) infection. Both, however, are readily treated with antibiotics. Additionally, one would imagine that recharging a biodegrader would be done either by the adults in a household, or in a facility designed for that specific purpose – adding yet another revenue stream to the company smart enough to jump on this part of the environmental bandwagon without government legislation.
Disclosure: Better Packages, Inc. does not trade on any stock exchange.