A team of Winchester College pupils has won US$25,000 as runners-up in an international sustainability competition. In an online awards ceremony on 24 April, the Earth Foundation announced that the three pupils – Maks, Eren and Alistair – competing under the team name ‘Bactoplastics’, placed in the top four out of 1290 teams worldwide.
The Earth Prize is an annual, global competition for teenage students, run by Geneva-based The Earth Foundation, that rewards the ideas and projects with the most potential to tackle environmental issues. In this year’s competition, there were entrants from 116 countries and territories around the world.
Working out of the school’s Biology department, Team Bactoplastics is producing a complete protocol for industrial production of biodegradable plastics, polyhydroxyalkanoates (PHA), from food waste using genetically engineered bacteria. PHAs are fully biodegradable thermoplastics, which are naturally produced by microorganisms for energy storage. They are already produced commercially but their feasability is limited due to high production costs. This is the result of challenges in purification, high cost of the raw resources, and low production yield.
A-Level pupil Maks Fedorovskyy, explained more: “We have designed a novel, cost-effective method for their production, which addresses the primary challenges in contemporary industrial PHA production. Our plastic substitutes most petroleum-based plastics for packaging and has potential to reduce plastic waste production by 67% in the UK.
Our product would reduce pressure on landfills due to its 7-week degradation time, while repurposing up to 1.5 million tonnes of food waste annually.”
The pupils spend 20 hours per week in the laboratory – on top of revising for five A Levels each – conducting dozens of biochemical experiments. They have secured a partnership with University College London to continue their work in their labs over the summer months. The team will be investing their prize money back into the project to try and ensure it can evolve to have a real world impact.
Categories: Winchester College
