A Canadian High School student, Daniel Burd, recently discovered a way to quickly degrade plastic bags – bacteria. I came across this interesting news in GeekDad’s Wired blog.
Burd isolated a type of bacteria that can hasten the breakdown of plastic, specifically the plastic from which grocery bags are produced. This discovery could change the way we dispose of plastic bags forever. As plastic grocery bags are a big part of the problem of an abundant source of slowly degrading waste products in the US, this finding should come as good news to environmentalists.
It will be interesting to see how much news this science fair project generates and if we will see commercial use of these little bugs in the future.
Science Matter 