fairfolio
Saved Projects

Decomposing Drinking Straws

CSEF · 2019 Environmental Engineering

Claire M. Boles · Capay Joint Union Elementary School, Orland, Glenn County

Overview

Objectives The objective is to determine what type of straw decomposes the fastest in manure compost Methods Three straws each of: wheat, paper, cornstarch, plastic, plastic-less with a bend, pasta. Bucket, manure based compost, thermometer, gram scale. Measure straws in gram then put in manure compost. At weekly intervals, removed, measured, observed straws, and returned to compost for eight weeks. Results At the end of 8 weeks, all straws were at different stages of decomposition with the exception of the paper and pasta straws which had completely decomposed. At the end, the three cornstarch straws weighed 2.60 grams. The plastic straws weighed 4.46 grams. The wheat straws weighed a total of 2.41 grams. The plastic- less straws with a bendable top weighed a total of 2.75 grams. Conclusions I found that the pasta straw is the best alternative to plastic straws because they decomposed in six weeks.

Summary statement

I decomposed six different types of straws in manure based compost to determine what straw has the least negative impact on our landfills.

Help received

I designed the project by myself. Katie Boles assisted with editing and Luke Kampmann provided manure based compost and gave additional information on the decomposing process

Competition history

  • CSEF 2019 Environmental Engineering · Entry J1105

Resources

Related projects

Closest projects by meaning, across every fair and year in the corpus.

Browse more like this

Source: California Science & Engineering Fair public projects

Save projects to your library

Sign in with Google to keep track of projects you find interesting, organized into folders. An account also raises your daily allowance for “Has this been done?”, and lets you create a key for the MCP server with a much higher limit than anonymous use. Browsing stays public.

Continue with Google