Banana peels as a substitute for petroleum based plastic

Sunday, 7 July 2013

Elif Bilgin has come up with an unusual idea - using banana peels as a substitute for petroleum based plastic.

Image Source: sorion.tumblr.com

The 16 year old student from Istanbul has spent the past two years perfecting the process to make a bioplastic from discarded banana peels. She hopes that, in time, the method can be utilised to produce plastics for electric cable insulation.

On Thursday, her efforts paid off when Scientific American named her the winner of its $50,000 Science in Action prize, a stepping stone to the Google Science Fair for young inventors in California this September.

In her research, Bilgin — who says, "science is my calling" — determined that if starch and cellulose from such food waste as mango skins can be used to make bioplastics, then banana peels ought to do the trick, too.

"For me, this means that my project actually has a potential to be a solution to the increasing pollution problem caused by petroleum-based plastic," said Bilgin, who counts Nobel laureate Marie Curie among her heroes.

"It also means that I have started the process of changing the world, which makes me feel like a winner already," she said.
Source: rawstory.com