Istanbul Teenager Develops Bioplastic From Bananas

Who considers a banana peel as well as assumes, “I could turn that right into plastic”? Elif Bilgin, for one. At age 16, the secondary school trainee from Istanbul, Turkey, even won a 2013 Google Science Fair honor for her strategy to turn banana peels into a bioplastic.

Words “bioplastic” can be made use of to describe a plastic that is biodegradable, suggesting it breaks down over time. Yet words also refers to a plastic made with renewable energies such as veggie oils, starches, and also various other biology-based active ingredients. Some, yet not all, plastics made of renewable resources are also biodegradable.

In her job summary, Elif clarifies that she intended to deal with bioplastics due to the fact that they might assist to lower air, land, as well as water air pollution triggered by conventional plastics, which are made with petroleum.

It took her 10 tries over the course of two years, yet she lastly developed a way to make a banana-peel plastic that is strong as well as stable adequate to be utilized in such products as fabricated limbs and also cord insulation. She reports that her approach was simple sufficient that individuals “can really do it in the house,” meaning that, a minimum of in theory, “any person could use this plastic.”

Elif states she loves doing scientific study, as well as one of her ideas is Marie Curie, the Nobel Prize-winning physicist who researched radioactivity. She intends to do even more projects that might be great for the environment. Her biggest dream? To eventually construct a “greenhouse made from waste materials.”

She also hopes to examine medication someday, a goal she says the money from her science fair honor can aid her reach. More vital, she claims, is that winning verifies she gets on the appropriate path, and “scientific research is my calls.”

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