At 16, Azza Abdel Hamid Faiad, a teenager from the Zahran Language School in Alexandria, has won the European Fusion Development Agreement award. Faiad invented a cost-effective way to turn a million tons of plastic trash that Egypt produces every year, into biofuel worth $78 million.
Impressed with Faiad’s trash-to-fuel formula to address the country’s plastic woes, the Egyptian Petroleum Research Institute gave her access to a specialised laboratory and a highly technical research team.
During her research, Faiad worked on a plastic conversion agent and found an inexpensive catalyst called aluminosilicate, which drastically reduces the cost of converting the plastic trash into gases like methane, propane and ethane. These gases can then be converted into ethanol, a biofuel. The by-product of the process releases other chemicals that can also be recycled and sold.
