Brody Jaworski
6th Grade, Indian Springs Middle School
Keller, TX
Raking up the fallen leaves in his yard, Brody saw just how many bags of leaves went to the trash. “I saw in our neighborhood all the bags of dead leaves stacked up and saw it was a big waste,” he says. He wanted to see if it would be possible to turn the dead leaves into something more useful. Brody knew that leaves were full of cellulose, and that cellulose was made of long chains of glucose. Knowing glucose was sticky, Brody decided to see if he could turn dead leaves into a glue.
Chemically Transforming Dead Leaves Into Adhesives
View PosterProject Background
Brody collected dried oak leaves and also collected iron from soil with a magnet. After crushing the leaves, he mixed them with pineapple juice, hydrogen peroxide, hydrogen peroxide with his collected iron or cellulase (an enzyme that breaks down cellulose). Then he waited for either an hour or a day.
Brody took a drop of the final mixture and put it between two sheets of cardboard, let it dry, and then measured how much force it took to pull the two sheets apart — a measure of how well his glue worked. The strongest glue was the pineapple juice with leaves (the positive control), then cellulase and then hydrogen peroxide. “The hydrogen peroxide with iron did not work as an adhesive as good as without iron because I think that the iron catalyst made the reaction too fast,” Brody says. He hopes that one day leaves could help make adhesive.
Beyond the Project
Brody likes to practice magic tricks and loves to read fantasy books “Magic tricks are kind of like fantasy to me because I read a lot about wizards,” he says. He loves STEM subjects and hopes to become a mechanical engineer. “I know it is not related to mechanical engineering, but I really want to do chemistry too,” he says.