The Boy who saved the planet.

Taken from The Week Magazine:

"A Canadian teen may have just solved the world's plastic problem. Every year, we throw away 500 billion plastic bags, and those that wind up in landfills won't degrade for 1,000 years. But high school junior Daniel Burd has figured out a way to destroy a plastic bag in record time. For a school science fair, Burd combined yeast, water, and bacteria-laden landfill dirt with pieces of a torn-up plastic bag, and let this soup sit for a few months. He then examined the decomposing plastic, isolating two strains of bacteria that were actually digesting the bags. After the six weeks, Burd found, these strains (Sphingomonas and Pseudomonas) could reduce the weight of a piece of plastic by more than 30 percent. If he could mass-produce these two strains in an industrial plant, Burd suggests that entire plastic bags could be decomposed in about three months' time. "This is a huge, huge step forward," Bard told his local paper, the Waterloo, Ontario, Record. "We're using nature to solve a man-made problem."

I remember when I was in high school, my projects consisted of replicas relating to the solar system.