We have a particular interest in students on their way to university, in the middle of their university experience, or just on their way out.  Today we celebrate the accomplishment of a young woman in Turkey with a science project that has been recognized as brilliant, as noted in this press release:

On Thursday, June 27, Elif Bilgin, 16, from Turkey, was declared the winner of the second annual Scientific American Science in Action Award, powered by the Google Science Fair. Bilgin won for her project, Going Bananas! Using Banana Peels in the Production of Bio-Plastic as a Replacement for Traditional Petroleum-Based Plastic. In addition to the $50,000 prize, Bilgin will have access to a year’s mentorship and is invited to Google’s California headquarters in September to compete in the 15-to-16-year-old age category in the overall Google Science Fair.

Her own description here:

In this project, my aim was to develop a method for using banana peels in the production of bio-plastic as a replacement for the traditional petroleum based plastic. The reason why I chose this particular aspect of science is that the bio-plastic is such a new concept and its range of use has been widening ever since it has been discovered (especially in the 21^st century). The bio-plastic is a material which has the potential of causing a biological reform by means of reducing the amount of pollution caused by other plastic materials which contain petroleum derivatives. Apart from this, the bio-plastic industry’s newness creates room for further development of the bio-plastics manufactured so far. Over a time period of 2 years, I was able to design a method and produce non-decaying plastic using banana peels which can be molded into a making cosmetic prosthetics or used in the electrical insulation of cables. This outcome supported my hypothesis. The method I designed is so simple, it is possible to say that one could actually do it at home (some chemicals used are irritant but not extremely dangerous). This way, anyone could use this plastic. Also, our beautiful planet will be spared from the consequences of the production of plastics with petroleum derivatives in them such as pollution of the air, land and water. In the future, I would like to do more projects concerning the environment. For example, my biggest dream is to build a greenhouse made of waste materials.