About Me

My name is Aleksander Stec and I am a senior at Sandy Creek High School. I've been working on this research project since my freshman year, becoming totally fascinated with polymer science, and chemistry in general.

I started this project as a result of my Scientific Research class my freshman year. As a part of the course, I needed to create a science fair project that revolved around water quality issues. Throughout my research, I found articles describing the incredible problems we face as a result of ocean pollution.

While bioplastics are not a new idea, they face many issues. To be able to meet the demands for certain uses, like withstanding water for use as a bottle, the bioplastic must be constructed to break down in high temperature environments. However, the only facilities capable of such composting processes are currently experimental and maintained by the plastic companies themselves. On the flip side, bioplastics that have an extended decomposition time frame (~6 months) have been found to fail to decompose because they are not in ideal conditions.

Over the past two years specifically, it has been my goal to create a plastic that can withstand the elements for a reasonable amount of time before decomposing, meaning my plastic can have a specific, targeted use.

These past four years, I've honed my research down. Originally starting with corn, carrot, banana, potato, yam, and avocado plastics, I found that avocado plastic produced the best results. The plastic not only decomposed in 15 days, but biodegraded entirely leaving no trace behind in a spectrophotometer and turbidity test.