Convincing plastic bags to self-destruct in a matter of weeks. Kid breeds a vat of bacteria that find nothing tastier than polyethelene plastic bags you collect at your local grocery store.

Next, Burd tested his strains’ effectiveness at different temperatures, concentrations and with the addition of sodium acetate as a ready source of carbon to help bacteria grow.

At 37 degrees and optimal bacterial concentration, with a bit of sodium acetate thrown in, Burd achieved 43 per cent degradation within six weeks.

Daniel Burd is a 16-year-old Grade 11 student in Ontario.

This sounds like something that could even be combined with your yard compost bin if studies work out; leaves, lawn clippings, food scraps, and now you don’t even have to empty out the plastic bags you were storing the food scraps in; just throw the whole thing in there, and the unspecified Pseudomonas will chew it up and spit it out.

The article says that Pseudomonas and Sphingomonas are the organisms doing the work. Well, that’s like saying that the safest brand of vehicle to drive is ‘car’. These two the labels indicate the genus of two relatively wide groupings of micro-organism; some antibiotic resistant strains that can mess us up, and some that spoil dairy products.

Interesting, even if the article’s dumbed-down for public consumption.