Angelina Arora was sitting in her local fish and chip shop looking at all the discarded fish waste. Piles of crab shells, prawn tails and fish heads. Kilos and kilos of it, all destined for the bin.

There had to be a better way, the 15-year-old budding young scientist thought.

So she got a few kilograms of discarded shells, took them to her Sydney Girls High School science lab, and started experimenting.

Eventually, she managed to find a way to turn them into a strong, light and biodegradable plastic.

​The year 10 schoolgirl hopes one day to see it used in plastic bags at supermarkets around Australia.

"The dream is to basically have every single plastic in the world made out of my plastic," she said.

In 2016 Angelina won first prize in chemistry for her age bracket at the NSW Young Scientist Awards for another plastic, this one made with cornstarch.

The cornstarch plastic broke down as soon as it was exposed to water – which made it very biodegradable, but also completely impractical.

However, the win did lead to an introduction to several scientists at CSIRO, who have remained her mentors on the current project.

Prawn shells contain a special hard but flexible protein called chitin (pronounced ky-ten). With the scientists' guidance, and a litre of hydrochloric acid, Angelina managed to extract the chitin from the shells.

She then combined it with an extremely sticky protein she extracted from the silk of silkworms.

"It's the same protein that spiders use to make webs. It's very sticky. When you mix it with chitin it produces a fabric that is flexible and strong and exhibits all the properties you want in plastic," she said.

The final material has the strength of a prawn's shell and the flexibility of a spider's web. The plastic also degrades completely with nothing harmful left behind.

"The shells used need a lot of preparation – but it's a lot less than normal plastics need, so that would reduce pollution," she said.

The dream is to basically have every single plastic in the world made out of my plastic.

Angelina Arora

For her work – detailed in a 67-page report replete with maps of the atomic structure of chitin, plus a photo of the plastic being held aloft by her mum, Ashima – she has received second prize in chemistry at this year's Young Scientist Awards.

That prize was not her real goal, though.

As part of an earlier project, she bought fish from her local fishmonger and cut them open. Inside, she found thousands of tiny fragments of plastic – telltale evidence of the huge amount of pollution humanity is continually dumping into the world's oceans.

Phasing out conventional plastics in favour of biodegradable ones like hers would go a huge way toward cleaning up the environment, she said.

Her father, Nitin, is very proud – and just a little baffled. "I only understand about 10 or 20 per cent of what she's doing. I cannot even pronounce the protein she's working on," he laughed.

Angelina also hopes to be a role model for other young girls considering a career in science, which is why she contacted Fairfax to tell her story.

"Right now science is deemed as a subject for nerds and for boys and I think the reason for this is how the media portrays it," she said.

"Even online, with some of the interviews I've done, you read the comments down the bottom. There are people out there that want to discourage people from doing this."