On a recent episode of the popular internet series Diggnation, they mentioned a teenager in Ontario decomposing a plastic bag over a period of three months.  If you’re not sure why this is a breakthrough, plastic bags regularly take up to a thousand years to break down.

Daniel Burd, a 16-year old student at Waterloo Collegiate Institute figured that something had to make plastic decompose and isolated the micro-organisms that do it.

First, he ground plastic bags into a powder. Next, he used ordinary household chemicals, yeast and tap water to create a solution that would encourage microbe growth. To that, he added the plastic powder and dirt. Then the solution sat in a shaker at 30 degrees.

After three months of upping the concentration of plastic-eating microbes, Burd filtered out the remaining plastic powder and put his bacterial culture into three flasks with strips of plastic cut from grocery bags. As a control, he also added plastic to flasks containing boiled and therefore dead bacterial culture.

Six weeks later, he weighed the strips of plastic. The control strips were the same. But the ones that had been in the live bacterial culture weighed an average of 17 per cent less.

That wasn’t good enough for Burd. 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.  (Source)

The part that blew me away is that this story happened a year ago and as far as I can tell, hasn’t gotten much press.  I mean, it just recently made the front page of Digg.com and as far as I know, there hasn’t been any significant research done on the subject.  I don’t know about you but this seems like something  significant…something that could change the way the world deals with our growing landfill problem.  With consumer culture ever expanding in our modern world, we can only assume that the production and use of plastics will continue for some time to come…at least until some kind of alternative can be mass-produced.  Getting rid of something that could be polluting our world for generations is probably something we should make a priority.