

Teen figures out how to decompose plastic bags in 3 months - robkwok
http://news.therecord.com/article/354044

======
TrevorJ
I never really thought about how accessible this kind of research actually is
to kids these days. Really cool article.

------
samwise
why not reuse the bags? way more efficient.

~~~
dazzawazza
You're right, unfortunately the majority of plastic bags sold/given away (in
the UK but I assume everywhere) are single use cheap plastic bags. They end up
being used as bin liners and sitting in land fills for hundreds of years.

The real problem is how to get the microbes to function in landfills so that
the contents can degrade at a faster rate.

Then you've got the problem of stopping secondary effects in landfills such as
water seepage. What happens if high concentrations of these microbes start
dissolving plastic water pipes? We could replace one mistake with another.

There is a long way to go but the kids made a good start. Ultimately we just
need to stop using plastic bags.

~~~
pmjordan
The way they've pretty much solved the plastic bag problem here (Austria) by
charging for them. Result: ~99% of people bring (and reuse) their own shopping
bags/baskets.

There are various incentives given by the UK supermarkets for using your own
bags (IIRC, Tesco: "green" points, Sainsbury's: 1p/bag saved off your
shopping, may have changed since I moved away from London) but they've got
them the wrong way around, as there's no penalty for carrying on as before. If
people start getting charged extra, a lot more will switch to using their own
bags. With only positive incentive, my gf and I were the only people we ever
saw who used their own bags.

The Austrian solution only applies to supermarkets, so other kinds of stores
still hand out free bags, although I suppose supermarkets are (were) probably
by far the biggest source of bags.

~~~
Tichy
In China they simply outlawed them recently.

Edit: apparently only cheap plastic bags are outlawed, story:
[http://www.sustainablebusiness.com/index.cfm/go/news.display...](http://www.sustainablebusiness.com/index.cfm/go/news.display/id/15042)

