Teen Decomposes Plastic Bag In 3 Months | Hacker News Reader

Teen Decomposes Plastic Bag In 3 Months

wired.com

102 pointskeltecp1172 comments

The 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.

Indeed. It is called anaerobic digestion. For more information:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anaerobic_digestion

The 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

The boy's achievement was decomposing polyethylene. I'm not entirely sure how Nylon-eating bacteria are relevant.

Indeed. To quote the more detailed original newspaper article linked from Wired: 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."

They must not have looked very hard: http://www.pubmedcentral.nih.gov/articlerender.fcgi?artid=23...

It's doubtful a high school student and teacher know where to look. They should have asked someone in, only remotely related, research for a quick search to dig up these kinds of papers.

The above link is the top search result from a search for bacteria and polyethylene: http://www.google.com/#hl=en&q=bacteria+polyethylene&...

It's worth noting that this paper refers to polyethylene glycol, which is not the stuff plastic bags are made from.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Polyethylene_glycol

Good stuff, but it's still that (Western?) way of thinking about treating the symptom.

I love plastic :(

I'd vastly prefer to recycle or decompose it than to never use it again.

Remember plastic is made of oil (petroleum) so people actually die for plastic.

Historically people die over anything desirable. Food, land, water, gold. There's no solution other than fixing human nature itself.

When did the US start the last war about food, land, water or gold?

1) 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.

So what's your point? War over petroleum (and thus plastic) is not that bad because we kill for other reasons too? Come on!

Many 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.

So 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.

I'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?"

The 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!!"

I don't really understand what this means. What is the symptom here, and what is it a symptom of?

The 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.

"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.

Well, 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.

It'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.

I 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.

South Australia has banned most plastic bags now and we're Western. When I see someone calling something a Western problem I typically think they are the sort of person who decries Western culture but still indulges in its benefits. That or an angry third-world dictator.

When I was in Western Africa, I got a plastic bag for practically every single purchase I made, even in rural markets.

Yes, I'd prefer Eastern medicine, where I get diagnosed as chi-deficient and treated with the powdered testicles of some rare animal.

I'm only partly joking.

I agree, but you made his point much better than he did and without the insult. I think the point is to be more conscious of what we consume. However, plastic is not going away anytime soon so we should instead encourage people (not mandate!) to attempt to consume less of these materials and at the same time keep innovating on finding replacement materials as well as ways to properly dispose.

"we could just keep canvas bags in our cars."

Or on our bicycles, indeed. Or our trouser pockets as we walk down to the local corner-shop.

"Green" bags have become quite popular in Australia. I think they look pretty horrible [1] though, but even girls carry them around while shopping. And you do not need to keep it in your pocket, just hang it on your shoulder.

[1] http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/thumb/d/d8/GreenBag...

They're also starting to do this in Canada as well, at least in Ontario. They're also now charging for plastic bags even though they're just as poor quality as before.

http://www.jpgmag.com/stories/1151 (I AM NOT PLASTIC bags!)

Every 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".

> 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.

By "externally motivated", do you mean money?

Money, 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) and computer science (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.

Physics 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.

> it's about how particle physicists are headed in the wrong direction. Oh no.

"Wrong," as the book's title suggests, is not a strong enough word.

The string theorists have proclaimed that we should no longer require a model of reality to make testable predictions. This should not be confused with an honest mistake, and the fact that a majority of the field's participants are in on the fraud is no excuse (when you lie for money, it is reasonable to call it fraud, whether or not the deed fits the narrow bounds of any legal definitions.) Physics has been Lysenkoized.

I fail to see how this is any kind of problem whatsoever, unless the externally motivated people impede the internally motivated people in such a way that negative progress is made.

> unless the externally motivated people impede the internally motivated people in such a way that negative progress is made

Is it not obvious to you that this must be the case? Every scientific field (and the set of professional researchers as a whole, I dare say) has a prevailing culture, like any other community. A scientific culture which rewards grantsmanship, bootlicking, and smoke-and-mirrors tricks is necessarily hostile to anyone who is genuinely devoted to advancing science.

I was going to congratulate you on the biting neologism, but a depressing search revealed 'grantsmanship' to be a whole field of study :(

I challenge you to suggest a better system.

Bring back Bell Labs, Xerox PARC, and their ilk. No grantsmanship, just buildings full of smart people working on whatever they like. That was the system which yielded the foundations for just about every technology you enjoy today.

Bell Labs pretty much won the Netflix prize

"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.

You are right........but still a commendable achievement for a 16 year old!

Better article about this here: http://news.therecord.com/article/354044

I keep reading this as "Teen Decomposes IN Plastic Bag........"

The first time i read the title I thought it was some kind of forensic investigation.

Especially since the url slug is just "teen-decomposes".

This 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).

That's a neat concept. Reminds me of http://www.etsy.com/view_listing.php?listing_id=7294910

Wonder 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...

What if we used genetically engineered bacteria like what startup LS9 are working on to create petroleum as the waste product?

http://www.ls9.com/

That would quite literally blow my mind then.

We also could blow the CO2 into urban greenhouses, which could make growing plants in the city more economic.

You 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.

Am 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?

Grocery 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.

If 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.

A 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).

It still depends on what the plastic decomposes into in the landfill. If this kid has helped solve that problem then it is still a step forward.

That's my point exactly.

This reminds me of a ted talk by Ray Anderson on "the business logic of sustainability". http://www.ted.com/talks/view/id/547

He founded and is CEO of a world wide carpet company. He figured out how to effectively recycle his carpets and how to reduce the amount of petroleum in the production. He now controls almost the entire life cycle of his carpets and manages to keep a tremendous amount of waste out of the landfill. Which is good, mainly because his business was responsible for a lot of that landfill.

As a nice side note, it was his attention to waste and his drive for seeing his company achieve sustainability (he defines it as not taking anything from the earth that cannot be easily replenished) that saved his business from probable collapse during the crash of 2001/2002.

Ray Anderson is one of the very few people at the top with an amazing sense of ethics. Quite a man.

This article is from 2008. Any updates?

Plastic 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.

"...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.

It's not clear that it's better to have more CO2 than more plastic bags.

The man himself: http://www.science.uwaterloo.ca/WWSEF/08Awards/08Burd06Port0...

I want this kid on my team... such a great concept.

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