By Anupum Pant
Banana peel is the most useless part of a banana, or is it? At least, not for young Elif Bilgin from Turkey. Elif, a 16-year-old girl from Istanbul, Turkey saw something useful in something as ordinary as a banana peel and sought to fight petroleum-based pollution by creating a bio-material from it which could probably be used as a replacement for plastic.
Experimenting for more than 2 years, and after numerous failed attempts, Elif was able to develop a simplified method involving very little equipment to create a new plastic from banana peel. She dreams that this bio-plastic will completely replace petroleum-based plastic some day and will probably used to make cosmetic prosthesis and in the insulation of cables.