Canada's Wunderkind

Throw away a plastic bag and microorganisms will eventually break it down -- in about 1,000 years. To Daniel Burd, an Ontario eleventh-grader, that raised an obvious question: why shouldn’t the process be speeded up? So he mixed ground-up plastic with sodium chloride, yeast, and landfill dirt; refined the brew to increase the concentration of microbes; and in about three months managed to reduce the volume of the plastic by 43 percent. His project won the Canada-Wide Science Fair, a $10,000 prize, and a $20,000 scholarship. Burd says there's no reason his idea shouldn’t work on an industrial scale -- all you need is a big fermenter.