Turkish teen won Scientific American's Science in Action Prize

Elif Bilgin's idea of using banana peels as a alternative for old-school petroleum-based plastics. The 16-year-old student from Istanbul spent two years perfecting a way to make a bioplastic out of thrown-away banana peels that could be rather utilized for the electrical insulation of cables.

On Thursday, her efforts gained acclaim when Scientific American named her the winner of its $50,000 Science in Action prize, a stepping stone to the Google Science Fair for young inventors in California this September. Bilgin through her research expressed that science is her calling, resolved that if starch and cellulose from such food waste as mango skins can be used to make bioplastics, then banana peels also has the probability to do the trick.

Bilgin, who counts Nobel laureate Marie Curie among her heroes said that for her, this becomes a prominent fact that her project in actuality has a potential to be a solution to the increasing pollution problem caused by petroleum-based plastic. Bilgin known to have added in an interview on the Scientific American’s website, scientificamerican.com that it also means that she have started the process of changing the world, due to that reason she expresses feeling like a winner already.

That's a genius idea!

(AW:Samrat Biswas)