A Canadian student has hacked nature and figured out a way to compress a 1,000 year process down to 3 months. As a science fair project, 16-year-old Daniel Burd used a special blend of microbes to speed up the decomposition of polyethelene plastic bags. The inspiration for the project was borne out of his frustration with the rapidly accumulating bags in his house. The process is very simple, has little waste product and is expected to scale up.
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.”
3 comments:
That's truly great news, Sanjay. Why don't you see if you can find a way to contact him and write and ask him if he will share his method with us?
Then maybe we can suggest it to the Ahmedabad Municipal Corporation.
Well done for finding and writing these interesting stories!
Rajiv
great going sanjay .these canadian students are up to some thing looks like they really got fed up of plastic.
sukanya
gr8888 why dont even we try out something like this ...................
Post a Comment