16 Year-Old Discovers Process to Speed Up Elimination of Plastic
I received an interesting e-mail from a French blogsite, e-citizen.tv, with an article about 16 year-old Canadian high school student, Daniel Burd, who put together the right balance of bacteria to eat plastic bags at a record rate of 42% elimination in just 6 weeks. That’s really close to ½ of a bag in a very short period of time. Plastic can take up to 1000 years to disintegrate.
I read Daniel’s report. Burd’s experiment is on PDF and the link is in the article. He worked with three different bacteria strains that feed on the organic material in the plastic bags. Daniel reasoned that if plastic eventually breaks down then there are bacteria that are able to digest the plastic bags. He was able to isolate the microbes that eat plastic and by mixing strains created bacteria that can really gobble the stuff without creating CO2 in the process.
Powdering landfills with Daniel Burd’s mix could substantially reduce the size of them. All I can ask is why didn’t an adult think to do this? Why didn’t science do this? Makes you wonder doesn’t it? Read about it:
June 16th, 2008 at 1:51 pm
Re your question: “Why didn’t an adult think to do this? Why didn’t science do this?”
One concern with engineering organisms that are relatively non-selective in what they consume is often referred to as the “grey goo” scenario. We need to be very careful what we genetically engineer and then release into the “wild” of a landfill. These things have a natural tendency to evolve and find new niche’s. I’d imagine you would not be very happy if someone dropped a sample of his bacteria in your car and it ate your dashboard, or in your home, where it ate all your electronics and everything else made of plastic and similar hydrocarbons.
Twenty years ago there were experiments with bacteria that could eat crude oil in oil slicks…imagine if that stuff got loose in our oil fields and ate all the worlds remaining crude oil.
There are rarely simple solutions to complex problems…or worse, the apparently simple solutions may end up causing far more problems.
Grey goo [from Wikipedia] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Molecular_assembler#Grey_goo
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Grey_goo
“…One convenient analogy for the grey goo problem is to consider bacteria as the most perfect example of biological nanotechnology”…”one scenario suggested danger to life could arise in the form of grey goo which consumes carbon to make more of itself. If unchecked such mechanical replication could potentially consume whole ecoregions or the whole Earth (ecophagy), or it could simply outcompete other natural lifeforms for necessary resources.”
June 16th, 2008 at 8:41 pm
These particular organisms are extremely selective about what they consume. That was the point. The kid isolated the organisms that only ate naturally occurring organic matter in plastic. Instead of laying around for 1000 years, it disappears in 20. There is no grey goo scenario here. And if we stuck to the same cautious principle relative to gray goo and cleaning up our mess when we’re creating the things that won’t biodegrade quickly and without harm to the air, earth, and water, we’d be a lot better off don’t you think? The gray goo of our world getting totally out of control right now is our own pollution. It will soon consume us in one way or another if we don’t stop it.
June 18th, 2008 at 7:27 am
My point seems to be missed here…the way to solve a problem like all the plastic trash in our landfills is first to stop producing so much plastic trash. Any solution to a problem is a poorly thought out one if it fails to address the original cause.
Other examples include programs to capture and sequester carbon emissions (when it makes more sense to try and consume less carbon-based fuels first), or big investments in hydrogen-fueled vehicles (when more carbon is consumed to make the hydrogen fuel than is saved by just using a more efficient internal combustion auto) http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hydrogen_vehicle
What I’m saying is we shouldn’t put blind faith in unproven new technologies to solve our problems without addressing the sources of the problems first.
These kinds of mentalities make me think of this old rhyme…
There was an old lady who swallowed a cat.
Imagine that, she swallowed a cat.
She swallowed the cat to catch the bird …
She swallowed the bird to catch the spider
That wriggled and jiggled and wiggled inside her.
She swallowed the spider to catch the fly.
But I dunno why she swallowed that fly
Perhaps she’ll die…
June 18th, 2008 at 5:52 pm
Sorry I didn’t get your point relative to gray goo. So you answered my question: And if we stuck to the same cautious principle relative to gray goo and cleaning up our mess when we’re creating the things that won’t biodegrade quickly and without harm to the air, earth, and water, we’d be a lot better off don’t you think?
I agree. Fix the source, not the symptom. Meanwhile, we’ve got an awful lot of symptom out there though. Should we just wait a thousand years to watch the trash dumps that are already there slowly dissolve? Because I don’t think we’re about to quit them anytime soon, although there is good news and bad news. The good is that MI is finally thinking of a 10 cent deposit for plastic water bottles. That will keep some out of the landfills. The bad news is that Pampers has a new commercial encouraging the use of those awful landfill clogging diapers. Using Pampers, a child somewhere gets free vaccine. This one step forward, two steps back isn’t helping matters.
June 18th, 2008 at 6:01 pm
Forgot to tell you thanks for the poem. I love poems like that. It’s a good poem to explain pollution in the water gets ingested by the fish, the fish are eaten by birds, birds are eaten by mammals, and people eat just about everything.