Jun 17th, 2009 @ 9:25 am

dalasverdugo: optimisto: 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, even if it does take millennia, and that something was probably bacteria. (Hey, at between one-half and 90 percent of Earth’s biomass, bacteria’s a pretty safe bet for any biological mystery.) The Record reports that Burd mixed landfill dirt with yeast and tap water, then added ground plastic and let it stew. The plastic indeed decomposed more quickly 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. If this is true, which it sure seems to be, then why in the hell have I not seen it on the news or watched a news conference with Al Gore explaining this major win for the environment?

dalasverdugo:

optimisto:

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, even if it does take millennia, and that something was probably bacteria.

(Hey, at between one-half and 90 percent of Earth’s biomass, bacteria’s a pretty safe bet for any biological mystery.)

The Record reports that Burd mixed landfill dirt with yeast and tap water, then added ground plastic and let it stew. The plastic indeed decomposed more quickly 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.

If this is true, which it sure seems to be, then why in the hell have I not seen it on the news or watched a news conference with Al Gore explaining this major win for the environment?

Reblogged from Pseudolectual.

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Horses and Shallow Lakes

Joshua Tuscan spills some thoughts here and they collect in a pool. I live in Seattle, btw.

I once cried because I couldn't draw a tree the way I saw it in my head. Granted, it was kindergarten, but it was a defining moment. One of my lifelong goals has been to ride a horse through a shallow lake, seriously, it's in my grade school journal. I lived in Barbados for a while where I almost lost my toe, which has stood as a metaphor in my life for that time. I watch a lot of movies and sometimes I fear that it is cutting into my ability to learn foreign languages. Oh yeah, I like to write beautiful, validated code.

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