As part of a science fair project, a Canadian teenager has come up with a way to get plastic shopping bags, which normally take up to 1,000 years to decompose, to break down in as little as three months.

Daniel Burd, a 16-year-old high school student in Waterloo, Canada, reasoned that, because plastic eventually degrades, there is probably some some microorganism out there that breaks it down. If that microbe could be identified, you could expose higher concentrations of it to plastic and break it down faster.

So Mr. Burd did just that. The Waterloo Region Record explains his experiment:

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 percent less.

That's really interesting. Makes me wonder what's the byproduct of this process.

The real solution is recycling plastic. I heard 250 million plastic water bottles are discarded each day, 60 million in the USA alone.
That's a lot of plastic, and a lot of oil wasted in the manufacture.