Over the past week I have taken out the plastic stripes in the plant pots, and winogradsky columns. The plastic stripes in all of the plant pots had no change at all. I was a little disappointed, because I was hoping to find something. However, I kind of expected that to happen, because plastic takes a lot of time to degrade. The purpose of planting them in the pots was to see if phytoremediation could accelerate the degradation. Unfortunately, that wasn't the case, and the plastic stripes remain unchanged.

     

The winogradsky columns before opening them

   The good news is that I did find a bit of change in the weight of the plastic stripes in my winogradsky columns. The change wasn't major, but then again I didn't leave the stripes a long time. Maybe there would have been a greater change if have done that. Now I am ready to move on to the next stage of my project…..identifying the bacteria. That is going to take me a while, and I am not going to finish this semester.