DUBAI: These days, Facebook newsfeeds are replete with posts about birds, even whales and tortoises, dying because of having ingested plastic products. Reminds everyone about a popular meme showing a man walking on discarded plastic shopping bags and empty drinking bottles in what actually was a sea.
Enter 24-year-old Miranda Wang and Jeanny Yao, who a few years back stumbled upon a bacterium that eats – devours, if you will – plastics.
In an interview with TED, a media organization that posts talks online for free distribution under the slogan “ideas worth spreading,” the young scientists shared it was all serendipitously: “I accidentally cracked the flask that had contained our third enrichment culture, and as a result, we had to wipe down the incubator room with bleach and ethanol twice. But this mistake turned out to be rather serendipitous.”
And so they went through the process and decided they’d submit their discovery to the Sanofi BioGENEius Challenge competition, which was recognized with the greatest commercialization potential.
The two recently landed on Forbes list of achievers, 30 Under 30 – Social Entrepreneurs 2019 and have individually received prestigious awards for their feat: Wang, the $100,000 Pritzker Emerging Environmental Genius Award from the UCLA Institute of the Environment and Sustainability; Yao, Toyota’s 25th Mother of Invention Award.
The two, shortly after coming up with their invention, opened a start-up named BioCellection, which, as Forbes puts it, turns each ton of plastic trash into more than $2,500 worth of chemicals and prevents 20 tons of carbon dioxide from being emitted.
The bacteria, according to science-andinfo.blogspot.com/, a tech portal, is capable of transforming plastic into carbon dioxide and water. The technology is used in two ways: To clean the beaches and also to produce raw materials for clothing.
