SIXTH form students at a school in Winchester reached the top four of a global sustainability competition beating more than 1,000 teams.

The team from Winchester College won $25,000 (£2,040) as runners-up in the Earth Prize, an international sustainability contest for teenage students organised by the Earth Foundation.

The competition saw 1290 teams enter from 116 countries. Winchester’s team ‘Bactoplastics’, made up of Maks, Eren and Alistair, nearly took the top spot for their idea for industrial production of biodegradable plastics, polyhydroxyalkanoates (PHA), from food waste using genetically engineered bacteria.

Hampshire Chronicle: Bactoplastics experiments

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PHAs are fully biodegradable thermoplastics, naturally produced by microorganisms for energy storage. The material although already made commercially is limited by high production costs due to purification, raw resources and low production yield.

Team member Maks Fedorovskyy said: "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 the potential to reduce plastic waste production by 67 per cent in the UK.

Hampshire Chronicle: Eren in the lab

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“Our product would reduce pressure on landfills due to its seven-week degradation time, while repurposing up to 1.5 million tonnes of food waste annually.”

The budding scientists spend 20 hours a week in the laboratory, on top of A Level revision, to conduct dozens of biochemical experiments and have secured a partnership with University College London to continue their work over the summer.

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.