Plastic Problem Solved?

We'll have to see if this works on a large scale but it sounds promising. The kicker is that a 16yo boy figured out the solution to one of the world's worst trash problems.

Brilliant!

From Wired magazine...

Plastic takes thousands of years to decompose -- but 16-year-old science fair contestant Daniel Burd made it happen in just three months.

The Waterloo, Ontario high school junior figured that something must make plastic degrade and that something was probably bacteria.

Burd mixed landfill dirt with yeast and tap water, then added ground plastic and let it stew. The plastic indeed decomposed more quickly [in three months] than it would in nature; after experimenting with different temperatures and configurations, Burd isolated the microbial munchers. One came from the bacterial genus Pseudomonas, and the other from the genus Sphingomonas.

Burd says this should be easy on an industrial scale: all that's needed is a fermenter, a growth medium and plastic, and the bacteria themselves provide most of the energy by producing heat as they eat. The only waste is water and a bit of carbon dioxide.

A few interesting facts about plastic bags...

• Every year, Americans throw away some 100 billion plastic bags. It's equivalent to dumping nearly 12 million barrels of oil.
• Only 1 percent of plastic bags are recycled worldwide -- about 2 percent in the U.S.
• There are 46,000 pieces of plastic litter floating in every square mile of ocean, according to the United Nations Environment Programme.
• In flood-prone Bangladesh, where plastic bags choked drainage systems, the bags have been banned since 2002.