The Woohoo! Report

The tiny Balkan country greets spring – and safeguards the environment – with a massive reforestation initiative.

By Chris Deliso

SKOPJE, Macedonia – Campaign season has arrived in Macedonia, with presidential and municipal elections next Sunday. Nevertheless, the locals made time for the third installment of the “Day of the Tree” initiative that began last March to help reforest this small Balkan country and raise ecological awareness.

On that first showing a year ago, more than 150,000 Macedonians planted 2 million trees in one day (symbolically, one for each citizen). Six million more were planted in November. Saturday’s event saw a combined 5 million trees planted nationwide by a diverse network of volunteers.

The Tree Day’s leader is Boris Trajanov, a world-renowned opera singer. “Our primary goal with this initiative is to create a greener Macedonia and to help our planet,” he said, while heading to the planting site of Ajvatinovski Rid, a dramatic ridgeline in the northeast. Along the way, schoolchildren giggled and waved and asked for more Tree Day buttons and flags.

“The kids are crazy for this!” beamed Mr. Trajanov, a father-of-three. “I love to see this side of it also – the people really enjoy being out in the fresh air, and having fun planting trees.”

About the size of Vermont, Macedonia boasts similar mountains, lakes, and verdure – but with much more litter. Building ecological awareness for future generations is an important part of the tree planting event, said Dutch Ambassador to Macedonia, Simone Filippini, speaking at another planting site just outside the capital, Skopje.

“The natural environment is the prime source of Macedonia’s beauty, and of its future tourism potential,” the ambassador said. “We hope this event will help build consciousness among Macedonians, to appreciate the beauty of what they have, to take care of it, and to teach their kids to do so, as well.”

Also helping out with a shovel at the site was Macedonia’s top diplomat, Minister of Foreign Affairs Antonio Milososki. He’s been kept busier than most European statesmen of late because of Macedonia’s peculiar predicament: its name. Neighboring Greece, which itself has a province named Macedonia, refuses to allow the country to join NATO, even under the “provisional name” agreed under UN auspices in 1995 – the unwieldy “Former Yugoslav Republic of Macedonia.” (The Monitor wrote about the issue in-depth here)

At the Bucharest NATO summit last April, then-President Bush and other world leaders were dismayed when Greece blocked Macedonia’s invitation, despite the fact that Macedonia had fulfilled all the technical criteria and already was contributing troops to US missions in Iraq and Afghanistan.

Domestically, Greece’s hardening stance has made it politically difficult for its own leaders to step back from a position that European Parliamentarian Charles Tannock recently stated was “bringing Greece into ridicule,” due to Athens’ sworn veto on Macedonia’s European Union aspirations so long as the country does not change its name.

Nevertheless, Minister Milososki remains patient. He’s also proud of how the Tree Day initiative has facilitated interactions between Macedonia’s sometimes fractious ethnic populations. “Tree Day is a uniting action, and investing in ecology is investing in our common future,” he said. Indeed, a major goal of Tree Day leader Trajanov’s team is to involve other Balkan countries in the next mass planting, scheduled for fall. So far, Montenegro has shown particular interest. Is there any interest from Greece?

The minister is sanguine. “I would be very happy in the future to plant a tree together with my Greek colleagues, on our common border,” Milososki said. “We could name it as the ‘tree of Greek-Macedonian friendship.’”

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Karen Kawawada
RECORD STAFF

WATERLOO

Getting ordinary plastic bags to rot away like banana peels would be an environmental dream come true.

After all, we produce 500 billion a year worldwide and they take up to 1,000 years to decompose. They take up space in landfills, litter our streets and parks, pollute the oceans and kill the animals that eat them.

Now a Waterloo teenager has found a way to make plastic bags degrade faster — in three months, he figures.

Daniel Burd’s project won the top prize at the Canada-Wide Science Fair in Ottawa. He came back with a long list of awards, including a $10,000 prize, a $20,000 scholarship, and recognition that he has found a practical way to help the environment.

Daniel, a 16-year-old Grade 11 student at Waterloo Collegiate Institute, got the idea for his project from everyday life.

“Almost every week I have to do chores and when I open the closet door, I have this avalanche of plastic bags falling on top of me,” he said. “One day, I got tired of it and I wanted to know what other people are doing with these plastic bags.”

The answer: not much. So he decided to do something himself.

He knew plastic does eventually degrade, and figured microorganisms must be behind it. His goal was to isolate the microorganisms that can break down plastic — not an easy task because they don’t exist in high numbers in nature.

First, he ground plastic bags into a powder. Next, he used ordinary household chemicals, yeast and tap water to create a solution that would encourage microbe growth. To that, he added the plastic powder and dirt. Then the solution sat in a shaker at 30 degrees.

After three months of upping the concentration of plastic-eating microbes, Burd filtered out the remaining plastic powder and put his bacterial culture into three flasks with strips of plastic cut from grocery bags. As a control, he also added plastic to flasks containing boiled and therefore dead bacterial culture.

Six weeks later, he weighed the strips of plastic. The control strips were the same. But the ones that had been in the live bacterial culture weighed an average of 17 per cent less.

That wasn’t good enough for Burd. To identify the bacteria in his culture, he let them grow on agar plates and found he had four types of microbes. He tested those on more plastic strips and found only the second was capable of significant plastic degradation.

Next, Burd tried mixing his most effective strain with the others. He found strains one and two together produced a 32 per cent weight loss in his plastic strips. His theory is strain one helps strain two reproduce.

Tests to identify the strains found strain two was Sphingomonas bacteria and the helper was Pseudomonas.

A researcher in Ireland has found Pseudomonas is capable of degrading polystyrene, but as far as Burd and his teacher Mark Menhennet know — and they’ve looked — Burd’s research on polyethelene plastic bags is a first.

Next, Burd tested his strains’ effectiveness at different temperatures, concentrations and with the addition of sodium acetate as a ready source of carbon to help bacteria grow.

At 37 degrees and optimal bacterial concentration, with a bit of sodium acetate thrown in, Burd achieved 43 per cent degradation within six weeks.

The plastic he fished out then was visibly clearer and more brittle, and Burd guesses after six more weeks, it would be gone. He hasn’t tried that yet.

To see if his process would work on a larger scale, he tried it with five or six whole bags in a bucket with the bacterial culture. That worked too.

Industrial application should be easy, said Burd. “All you need is a fermenter . . . your growth medium, your microbes and your plastic bags.”

The inputs are cheap, maintaining the required temperature takes little energy because microbes produce heat as they work, and the only outputs are water and tiny levels of carbon dioxide — each microbe produces only 0.01 per cent of its own infinitesimal weight in carbon dioxide, said Burd.

“This is a huge, huge step forward . . . We’re using nature to solve a man-made problem.”

Burd would like to take his project further and see it be used. He plans to study science at university, but in the meantime he’s busy with things such as student council, sports and music.

“Dan is definitely a talented student all around and is poised to be a leading scientist in our community,” said Menhennet, who led the school’s science fair team but says he only helped Burd with paperwork.

Other local students also did well at the national science fair.

Devin Howard of St. John’s Kilmarnock School won a gold medal in life science and several scholarships.

Mackenzie Carter of St. John’s Kilmarnock won bronze medals in the automotive and engineering categories.

Engineers Without Borders awarded Jeff Graansma of Forest Heights Collegiate a free trip to their national conference in January.

Zach Elgood of Courtland Avenue Public School got honourable mention in earth and environmental science.

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