It would normally take a plastic bag about 1000 years to fully disintegrate but things could change now. It can now take as little as 3months for a plastic bag to decompose.

According to TheRecord, Daniel Burd, a 16 year old Canadian teenager has found a way to do this. How did he do it? First, he turned the plastics bag into powder. Next, he created a solution that would promote microbe growth by mixing chemicals, yeast and tap water. After which he added the plastic powder and dirt. Then the solution sat in a shaker at 30 degrees.

After increasing the concentration of plastic-eating microbes for three months, Burd filtered out the remaining plastic powder and put his bacterial culture into three flasks with strips of plastic cut from grocery bags. He also added plastic to flasks containing boiled and therefore dead bacterial culture as a control. Six weeks later, he weighed the strips of plastic, and the ones that had been in the live bacterial culture weighed an average of 17 per cent less.

Burd felt that it wasn’t good enough. Hence, to identify the bacteria in his culture, he let them grow on agar plates and found he had four types of microbes. He tested those on more plastic strips and found only the second was capable of significant plastic degradation. Next, Burd tried mixing his most effective strain with the others. He found strains one and two together produced a 32 per cent weight loss in his plastic strips. So he concluded that strain one helps strain two reproduce.

Tests to identify the strains found strain two was Sphingomonas bacteria and the helper was Pseudomonas. A potential future top scientist indeed.

Via - TheRecord