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Teen Decomposes Plastic Bag In 3 Months
- keltecp11 17y agoI want this kid on my team... such a great concept.
- keltecp11 17y agoThe man himself: http://www.science.uwaterloo.ca/WWSEF/08Awards/08Burd06Port01.jpg http://www.science.uwaterloo.ca/WWSEF/08Awards/08Burd06Port0...
- euroclydon 17y agoGood stuff, but it's still that (Western?) way of thinking about treating the symptom.
- jsonscripter 17y agoI love plastic :( I'd vastly prefer to recycle or decompose it than to never use it again.
- onreact-com 17y agoRemember plastic is made of oil (petroleum) so people actually die for plastic.
- TrevorJ 17y agoHistorically people die over anything desirable. Food, land, water, gold. There's no solution other than fixing human nature itself.
- onreact-com 17y agoWhen did the US start the last war about food, land, water or gold?
- mrkurt 17y ago1) War doesn't have a monopoly on killing people. 2) We've forcefully relocated (and killed!) people for their land several times in the past few hundred years. 3) How much violence in this country is sparked over money? Michael Mann's made some pretty good movies dramatizing bank robberies that result in gunfights.
- onreact-com 17y agoSo what's your point? War over petroleum (and thus plastic) is not that bad because we kill for other reasons too? Come on!
- briancooley 17y agoMany common plastics are made from ethylene and propylene, which are byproducts of the refining process and for many years were simply burned in flares. The fact that those (formerly waste) gases are now turned into useful products is a turn for the better, I think. Eliminating plastic would have no significant impact on the exploration and production of oil. Things are not always as simple as they seem.
- onreact-com 17y agoSo why lead rising oil prices to higher costs of plastic if it's just trash or a "byproduct"? There is no future for oil based fuels and plastics if you want to keep this planet.
- ScottWhigham 17y agoI'm absolutely effing baffled at your statement so forgive me if I seem incoherent. Here's what I assume from your sentence: You think that, instead of ridding the world of billions of rather large and bulky objects that won't decompose for thousands of years, we should leave those alone and instead focus our thinking on how not to produce any more. I imagine a cartoon of a man standing on the earth with a megaphone screaming, "Everyone - listen up! This - this thing right here - it's incredibly important and I want everyone (and i mean everyone) to focus exclusively on it! World - are you listening to me? Stop trying to do other things! I don't care if thousands of you end up reproducing each others work - it's all in the name of solving this problem! I said stop trying to multitask - we've got to exclusively solve this one thing! World? Hello?"
- gamache 17y agoThe man with the megaphone would have a bright future in the Catholic Church. "Put down that box of rubbers, I have something important to say!!"
- Gormo 17y agoI don't really understand what this means. What is the symptom here, and what is it a symptom of?
- thras 17y agoThe above poster has a valid point. He thinks that rather than making millions of single-purpose plastic bags and then going through an expensive process to clean up after them, we should instead not produce the plastic bags in the first place. For example, we could just keep canvas bags in our cars. That the parent has been moderated down so much is troubling.
- edw519 17y ago"That the parent has been moderated down so much is troubling." It's only troubling until you understand why. No one would reasonably argue against the idea of producing something other than plastic in the first place. The downmodding was most likely in response to the word "Western". Bash the U.S. (or anyone else, for that matter) and get downmodded. What's so troubling about that? You can make a logical point on hn without insulting anyone else. The downmodding here is a clue to do just that.
- euroclydon 17y agoWell, I questioned whether it's a Western phenomenon. I'm not trying to bash the U.S. I like being a citizen. I was actually trying to make an analogy to diet, health and medicine, where Western lifestyles have traditionally been found to be inferior to Eastern ones, because we, on average, eat crappy food, get diseases, then spend a bunch of money trying to fix the symptoms of those diseases.
- swombat 17y agoIt's hardly a western problem. I've been to Hong Kong and Taiwan, and they have just as many plastic bags as we ("The West") do, if not more. And they're just as concerned about them as we are.
- prewett 17y agoI just got back from HK, and while I was there I saw a bunch of advertisements warning that many stores will start charging HK$0.50 for plastic bags if you don't bring your own bag. Seems like a good move.
- wallflower 17y agoThis reminds me of when I was a kid I found an old but great book of kid's craft projects. I really wanted to make the cool, interesting-looking hammock that was made out of hundreds of plastic 6-pack beverage holders strung together with nylon rope. However, my parents told me that if I built it, it would decompose (the plastic formulation had changed to prevent seagulls and the like from being ensnared by discarded 6-pack rings).
- keltecp11 17y agoThat's a neat concept. Reminds me of http://www.etsy.com/view_listing.php?listing_id=7294910 http://www.etsy.com/view_listing.php?listing_id=7294910
- deleted 17y ago[deleted]
- joshfinnie 17y agoWonder how much heat this process creates? Could we get rid of plastic and run a turbine? Maybe there's a hope for green energy afterall...
- froo 17y agoWhat if we used genetically engineered bacteria like what startup LS9 are working on to create petroleum as the waste product? http://www.ls9.com/ http://www.ls9.com/ That would quite literally blow my mind then.
- die_sekte 17y agoWe also could blow the CO2 into urban greenhouses, which could make growing plants in the city more economic.
- philwelch 17y agoYou missed the part where this produces CO2. And it's producing CO2 from a petroleum product, which means this is CO2 that's been out of the carbon cycle for millions of years, which means it's all net CO2.
- tc 17y agoThe process he went through is so obvious that someone must have done this already [1], right? Right? If this really is a new discovery, what would astound me is how easily everyone else must have given up. [1] Not that it would take anything away from this guy, who did it at 16 with limited resources and probably without regard to existing research.
- rawr 17y agoIndeed. It is called anaerobic digestion. For more information: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anaerobic_digestion http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anaerobic_digestion
- biohacker42 17y agoThe story about this kid keeps making the rounds, I guess it must be a slow news summer, no shark attacks. This is great for a teen and highschool project, but it's not quite as great as the article makes it out to be. And yes, it is old news: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nylon-eating_bacteria http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nylon-eating_bacteria
- rawr 17y agoThe boy's achievement was decomposing polyethylene. I'm not entirely sure how Nylon-eating bacteria are relevant.
- alex_stoddard 17y agoIndeed. To quote the more detailed original newspaper article linked from Wired: http://news.therecord.com/article/354044 http://news.therecord.com/article/354044 " A researcher in Ireland has found Pseudomonas is capable of degrading polystyrene, but as far as Burd and his teacher Mark Menhennet know -- and they've looked -- Burd's research on polyethelene plastic bags is a first."
- biohacker42 17y agoThey must not have looked very hard: http://www.pubmedcentral.nih.gov/articlerender.fcgi?artid=239126 http://www.pubmedcentral.nih.gov/articlerender.fcgi?artid=23...
- BigZaphod 17y agoBetter article about this here: http://news.therecord.com/article/354044 http://news.therecord.com/article/354044
- wrinklz 17y ago"this young man who may have managed to solve one of the most intractable environmental dilemmas of our time" Solved? He demonstrated a proof of concept. But this was not news. Was the product of decomposition environmentally safe? Is the process economically feasible? Does it scale? All three questions need to be yes before we can say he solved the problem. Having said that, I am not knocking the kid or his school project. We need more experimentalists in the world.
- adharmad 17y agoYou are right........but still a commendable achievement for a 16 year old!
- Alex3917 17y agoIf you have all plastic of the same kind, it's much better to recycle it. If you have garbage of all different kinds, this technique is useless. Everyone with basic scientific literacy already knows you can do this. But it doesn't solve any problem, let alone "the most intractable problem of our time" or whatever. This whole article is just linkbait written by interns to scam more ad impressions off of dumb people. Wired has truly learned much from the Reddit acquisition.
- warfangle 17y agoA lot of plastic recycling isn't recycling - it's downcycling. Plastic bottles become carpet becomes landfill fodder. It just delays the inevitable. A lot of this has to do with the dyes used in plastics manufacturing. It also has to do with the limited mutability of most plastics - the quality of the plastic after one cycle of recycling (in this example, plastic bottle -> carpet) is reduced. Once it's turned to carpet, it becomes difficult to recycle this again due not only to this reduction in quality, but also because it becomes difficult to remove the plastic carpet material from the carpet backing. Attempting to recycle it again would result in a further inferior product - and it would be much more expensive (diminishing returns). I'll say it again: Recycling as we know it is downcycling. It's good, in that it reuses the raw materials - but only for so many cycles. Eventually it ends up in the landfill. The only true solution would be to manufacture consumables as if they're in a closed ecosystem - either able to easily be reused, or easily put into the natural ecosystem. Read "Cradle to Cradle" by William McDonough for more information (the book itself is printed on special infinitely recyclable plastic paper; the ink can be removed by boiling the book).
- liquidben 17y agoAm I wrong in expecting that there should be something more than carbon dioxide and water? I would be the first to admit I know nothing of the molecular composition of the things involved, but shouldn't there be nitrogen leftover somewhere?
- briancooley 17y agoGrocery bags are made from polyethylene, which is composed only of carbon and hydrogen. Decomposition would not necessarily involve nitrogen. I can't speak to the byproducts of the bacteria.
- wtdominey 17y agoThis article is from 2008. Any updates?
- biohacker42 17y agoPlastic is easy enough to recycle/burn/bury and that's what happens most of the time. A lot of plastic pollution is from micro particles that escape during the process of manufacture, shipping, etc. China banned plastic bags because: They were sick of them, alternatives are easily available and some times authoritarian governments can do the right a lot faster then democratic ones. The rest of the world continues as before, except that this story keeps making the rounds.
- cschep 17y ago"...some times authoritarian governments can do the right (thing?) a lot faster then democratic ones..." I really like this train of thought. It's so easy to get caught in Democracy = CORRECT. For me anyway.
- pohl 17y agoEvery time this story comes around I'm struck by one thing: it's no wonder that kids tend to dream more of becoming professional athletes than they do of careers in the sciences. If they do they do something great in the former, no one will deny their accomplishment. If they do something great in the latter, the response will be "Meh".
- asciilifeform 17y ago> If they do something great... the response will be "Meh". I still think that there are too many externally motivated people going into science, rather than too few.
- BrentRitterbeck 17y agoBy "externally motivated", do you mean money?
- asciilifeform 17y agoMoney, honors, influence - anything contingent on impressing an audience. An externally motivated person is capable of doing good science, given the right incentives. However, the way science is funded in most of the world today provides incentives for showmanship, rather than results. This trend has already destroyed physics (http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0465092756 http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0465092756) and computer science (http://unqualified-reservations.blogspot.com/2007/08/whats-wrong-with-cs-research.html http://unqualified-reservations.blogspot.com/2007/08/whats-w...) as respectable, intellectually honest fields. Internally motivated people, driven purely by a love of their field's conceptual beauty, are invulnerable to having their goal system perverted by such systemic rot.
- zackattack 17y agoPhysics hasn't been destroyed. I love your passion but your claims are sensationalist. I looked at the reviews of the book, and apparently it's about how particle physicists are headed in the wrong direction. Oh no.
- dan_the_welder 17y agoI keep reading this as "Teen Decomposes IN Plastic Bag........"
- rabidsnail 17y agoIt's not clear that it's better to have more CO2 than more plastic bags.