16 Student identifies microorganisms that can biodegrade plastic bags Cagliani
Posted by Martin July 31, 2009
The plastic does not biodegrade, it may take hundreds of years until the sun other natural agents it will degrade. For That is usually a dream of environmentalists plastic or withdrawn, or who manages to create a biodegradable plastic. Apparently a 16 year old student has created plastic bags that biodegrade in just three days.
No joke, we have seen here in Sustentator how the plastic accumulates around the world, as in the great Pacific Garbage Patch. Every year millions of tons of plastic that can take up to a thousand years to decompose. Meanwhile ... kill thousands of animals throughout the world, eat or get stuck with practical materials.
A Canadian teenager Daniel Burd, presented a science project in the Science Fair in Ottawa Canada-Wide. His invention gave him many awards, including 10 thousand dollars and a scholarship of $ 20 000.
Daniel, aged 16, took his environmentalist idea of \u200b\u200bwhat we see daily. "Every week", he says, "I have to do household chores, and when I open the closet door, falling down is a plastic bag. One day I got tired, and wanted to know what others did with their plastic bags. " The answer was: nothing. So he decided to do something.
Plastic is not biodegradable, that is not degraded by bacteria and other materials, but is degraded, yes, but very slowly, just as almost as a stone. Daniel knew that eventually degrade the plastic ends, but had to accelerate this degradation. So he began to study microorganisms that could degrade the plastic.
What he did was an experiment that took months, proving that microbes were able to degrade plastic. At the end able to identify four types of microbes that if they are applied to a common plastic bag degraded, although not completely.
So many mixed plastic eating microbes, and managed to assist each other to either play or degrade plastic. The two winners are the Sphingomonas bacteria, and Pseudomonas assistant.
must realize that we're talking about a guy at school, which has succeeded with the school team, something many researchers worldwide with the best teams have been unable, or unwilling to achieve.
The result is that Daniel discovered that plastic can be biodegraded, with human assistance. An industrial application of Daniel's home method would be cheaper. And they would be using nature to solve one of the biggest problems of humanity, the plastic trash that accumulates per ton on land and water.
Source: http://news.therecord.com/article/354044
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