Meet Elif Bilgin: Banana-peels Bioplastic

Meet Elif Bilgin: Banana-peels Bioplastic

Meet Elif Bilgin: Banana-peels Bioplastic

Turkish student-scientist Elif Bilgin, from Istanbul, has spent two years experimenting with ways to produce a bioplastic out of used banana peels—and now her really hard work has paid off.

Bilgin is the winner of the 2013 $50,000 Science in Action award from the Google Science Fair. The young scientist says that the banana bioplastic could be used for the electrical insulation of cables.

Her hope, big picture-wise, is that bioplastics could one day replace petroleum-based plastics that harm the environment in oh-so many ways, including constituting 90 percent of all trash floating on the ocean’s surface. That’s 46,000 pieces of plastic per square mile!

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