Tribewanted: Vorovoro

There’s an article on TheRecord.com that describes a Canadian teenager, Daniel Burd, who has won the Canada-wide Science Fair with a project that demonstrates a way to isolate and utilize microbes that can decompose polyethylene plastic bags in 12 months.

http://news.therecord.com/News/CanadaWorld/article/354044

What’s interesting when reading this article is that the experimentation and methods the student followed aren’t that difficult, and the steps to reproduce his work are easy to reproduce.

Which raises a lot of questions for me. Number one, why wasn’t this research done ten years ago? Why has a student discovered this instead of an environmental agency or publicly sponsored scientist?

The promise of technology can sometimes throw up blinders that keep us from seeing the potential of the present. It’s much cooler to imagine hydrogen-powered cars and biodegrading plastics than to look at making current combustion engines more efficient, or researching how to expedite the decomposition of currently used plastics.

It’s amazing, however, the results that working within constraints can provide. With minimal equipment and not much more than a standard chemistry set, Burd has found a solution to a problem others were throwing high-tech solutions at.