Blinded me with science

Lots of people fantasize about having second careers — sidelines where they get to exhibit their expertise in, say, flying helicopters or cooking meth.

My wife and I aren’t exactly looking to start a mobile meth lab in an RV someday (like Bryan Cranston’s character in Breaking Bad), but when our 10-year-old daughter was having trouble with her school science experiment — she desperately wanted to make biodegradable plastic out of banana peels — we thought we could pool our combined minds and resources to help her out a little.

No, that doesn’t mean doing her work for her. I deplore the way some parents here take over kids’ assignments or do their homework for them (though, to be fair, they usually just turn over said task — say, cross-stitching a throw pillow — to the handy househelp). I’ve seen parents do this so many times. And all I can say is: why didn’t our parents do this for us when we were growing up instead of forcing us to whittle canoe paddles for a Boy Scout merit badge? Huh??

But since our daughter was starting to experience deadline vertigo about finishing her science project in time, we consented to jump in and help her one Sunday afternoon with the heavy chemistry.

The only problem is, we’re not chemistry whizzes. Not by a long shot. Even measuring out brownie mix is a major challenge for me, though not for my wife. We quickly found ourselves bogged down in finding out how much distilled water is needed to make a .05 percent solution of sodium metabisulfite, or now many milliliters is the equivalent of three grams of sodium hydroxide. Within minutes, we no longer felt like Walter White, expertly mixing up a batch of blue meth; we felt more like Jesse Pinkman, stumbling his way through Intro Chemistry with a D minus.

And what’s worse, this is the kind of stuff that’s expected of 10-year-old kids nowadays! Science experiments have definitely changed a lot since we were kids. No more erupting volcanoes or easy-to-grasp potato battery experiments; that’s just too low-tech. Now, thanks to our eco-sensitive times, every kid has to come up with a master plan to save the dolphins, or plug up the ozone layer. Kids are expected to come up with hard-science solutions to the environmental crises created by their parents and countless generations before them. It seems only fair: we made the mess, now you clean it up.

Witness the Biodegradable Plastic Banana Peel Project. Our daughter had tried, about a half dozen times, to convert the discarded peels — which make up a plentiful waste supply globally — into something resembling plastic, if not visually (the results were always a range of colors from beige to black), then at least in tensile strength. She had stumbled upon this high school experiment done by a Turkish girl (thanks, YouTube) that seemed to work (and netted the girl prize money of $50,000), so we set about reproducing the results.

Strangely, access to dangerous chemicals was not a problem (since our daughter’s lola has a friend who works in a laboratory). So before you know it, we had our hands on sodium metabisulfite, sodium hydroxide, glycerine and hydrochloric acid. (Not to mention a huge pile of uneaten bananas that had been stripped of their peels. We later used those for banana smoothies.)

Some of the above chemicals, mind you, are fairly toxic and dangerous; fumes are to be avoided, as well as contact with skin. Why sixth graders are allowed to even handle such exotic chemicals kind of puzzles me. 

But being fans of Breaking Bad, we fancied ourselves pretty resourceful with a scale and test tube (or the homegrown equivalent: measuring spoons and a Pyrex cup). As mentioned earlier though, basic converting was a stumbling block. So was getting ingredients to act the way they did in previous experiments. Whatever happened to “reproducible results”? Granted, we weren’t in a chemistry lab surrounded by Bunsen burners and graduated cylinders — just in a simple kitchen space with cookie trays and wax paper. But why does science have to be, like, so hard?

Getting science to behave the way you want it to is like trying to get a dog to wear a tuxedo, sit at the table with you and use the proper soup spoon. It’s frustrating, and futile. We tried “drying” banana peels in a microwave (in the interest of expediency), and nearly blew up the damn microwave. I watched flames shooting out of the Pyrex bowl and pulled the plug. Later, I contemplated the Saran Wrap covering the bowl, now wilted into a clingy ball, and got a crafty idea: perhaps, I suggested to our daughter, you could just submit the nuked Saran Wrap as your final project? They might never know the difference.

Ah, but our daughter knew. And she is incurably honest. She would never allow such fake science to slip by on her watch. So it was back to the chemicals and Osterizer and Pyrex measuring cups.

At the end of the day, we witnessed a chemical reaction, but no magic biodegradable plastic for our hard efforts. Our tray of oven-baked, chemically-pumped-up banana peels remained as resolutely un-plastic-like as they were when they were first clothing fruit. Our “Heisenberg” moment was short-lived. And we realized something else: we can now cross off “meth chefs” from our future résumés.

Probably a good thing.