Scientists find worms can safely eat the plastic in our garbage

[GennGreymane]

http://www.sciencealert.com/scientis...in-our-garbage

Garbage is a big problem. Even with so many of us doing our bit to help out with recycling, the amount of unrecyclable and discarded plastics in the US alone comes close to 30 million tonnes annually, thanks to things like disposable coffee cups (2.5 billion of which are thrown away by Americans every year). We’re looking at you, Starbucks.

Now, for the first time, researchers have found detailed evidence that bacteria in an animal’s gut can safely biodegrade plastic and potentially help reduce the environmental impact of plastic in landfill and elsewhere. The animal in question? The humble mealworm – which turns out to be not so humble after all.

Researchers led by Stanford University in US and Beihang University in China found that the mealworm – the larval form of the darkling beetle – can safely subsist on a diet of Styrofoam and other kinds of polystyrene, with bacteria in the worm’s gut biodegrading the plastic as part of its digestive process. The findings are significant because it was previously thought that these substances were non-biodegradable – meaning they ended up in landfill (or worse, our oceans, where they’d accumulate for decades).

“Our findings have opened a new door to solve the global plastic pollution problem,” co-author Wei-Min Wu, a senior research engineer in the Department of Civil and Environmental Engineering at Stanford, said in a statement.

In the study, 100 mealworms ate between 34 and 39 milligrams of Styrofoam each day, converting about half into carbon dioxide and the other excreting the bulk of the rest as biodegraded droppings. They remained healthy on the plastic diet, and their droppings appeared to be safe for use as soil for crops.

Compared to the amount of plastic people go through every year, the mealworms’ capacity to process our waste product might not sound like much, but further research could help us engineer more powerful enzymes for plastic degradation, including processing other kinds of currently impervious plastics, including polypropylene, microbeads, and bioplastics.

The researchers are also looking to find whether a marine equivalent of the mealworm may exist, as hundreds of thousands of tonnes of plastic in the world’s oceans are an ongoing environmental concern.

“There’s a possibility of really important research coming out of bizarre places,” said Craig Criddle, a professor of civil and environmental engineering who supervised the research. “Sometimes, science surprises us. This is a shock.”

The studies are published here and here in Environmental Science & Technology.

[zenkai]

I read a little bit about this yesterday, pretty cool

[Deleted]

Great news if this works out, although it might be a little disturbing visually.

[Jetstream]

Great news if this works out, although it might be a little disturbing visually.

Maybe, but the goal appears to be to synthesize the chemical that does it and just dump it wholesale on the plastics in question to dissolve them independent of mealworm involvement.

Hell, if it's safe enough, maybe they could use it to somehow deal with those giant plastic floaties in the ocean.

[Lava Bucket]

This is great news, but I wonder if they can handle polypropylene and polyethylene.

Edit: Ah, they can't. Perhaps a little genetic engineering is needed here. Could there come a day when this thing is eaten by worms or bacteria?

[Detheavn]

Genetic engineering?
I know it's just a manga, but I do hope the world isn't considering in creating something similar like in: Bio-Meat

[Bushtuckrman]

That is outstanding news and I hope it comes to fruition globally.

[Trassk]

Yep, nature finding a solution for mankinds hubris, you know the part where plastic doesn't exist in nature, so nature has to find a way to break it down and turn it to shit.

[Yxiomel]

This is great news, but I wonder if they can handle polypropylene and polyethylene.

Edit: Ah, they can't. Perhaps a little genetic engineering is needed here. Could there come a day when this thing is eaten by worms or bacteria?

Hopefully! Just as long as it doesn't turn into stage 1 of the grey-goo scenario

[Independent voter]

And so it begins

[dextersmith]

Tell the powers that be so we can go back to using plastic grocery bags.

[Garnier Fructis]

Tell the powers that be so we can go back to using plastic grocery bags.

These worms won't solve the problem that banning plastic bags is intended to fix. Which is that people throw them everywhere. This potentially is a solution to the problem of "what do we do with all this plastic that people properly disposed of?"

[unbound]

And anything they can't eat, they can take care of with a few well-placed grenades.

[Hyve]

What I love is just how amazing we as a species are, as well as our ability to create or alter those around us to suit our needs. We find our issues, and we find solutions, we create whole new technologies, or utilize nature to its best to support our society. Got to give it to us as a species, we're ingenious.

[ro9ue]

Yet another day I fucking love science.

[Deleted]

great news, hurray for us!

wtfisdis30charsthingreallyuhitswaytoomuch

[Tierbook]

It's not so much worms as meal worms.... also I think we'd need about 30 or 300 trillion of them to deal with the daily amount we use..... or something like that, someone on reddit did the math.

[Rudol Von Stroheim]

What I love is just how amazing we as a species are, as well as our ability to create or alter those around us to suit our needs. We find our issues, and we find solutions, we create whole new technologies, or utilize nature to its best to support our society. Got to give it to us as a species, we're ingenious.

Some of the time.

Most of the time our solutions and science are at best knee-jerk. Based on populist movements versus sound reasoning or execution.

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It's not so much worms as meal worms.... also I think we'd need about 30 or 300 trillion of them to deal with the daily amount we use..... or something like that, someone on reddit did the math.

The idea isn't so much to use meal worms but to synthesize the process in which they break down the plastics.