Dissolving the plastic bag problem

By rights the world and its dog should now know the name Daniel Burd. For Daniel Burd has an eco-friendly solution for disposing of the plastic bag menace. About half a trillion plastic bags are produced globally each year, but they take up to 1000 years to decompose. In the meantime they can migrate to the oceans and be ingested by wildlife, with fatal results.

Burd’s discovery is bacteria which he reckons in combination can eliminate poly(ethyl)ene bags in about three months. The judges of the 2008 Canada-Wide Science Fair in Ottawa agreed, and awarded Burd top prize.


… Further research by Burd on his microbe consortium, as his paper terms it, showed that their rate of digesting polythene was affected by temperature, population density, and by the level of concentration of added sodium acetate. He eventually achieved a stonking 42 per cent elimination of polythene in six weeks. On this basis, Burd projects that a complete dispersal of polythene is possible in under three months.

You can do this at home, folks, and you don’t need lab equipment, or even to chop up the plastic bags. Burd is reported as having tried five or six whole bags in a bucket of his special goo, and the process worked just as well.

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