The waste of the plastic-fed mealworm also appear to be safe to use as soil for crops, Wei-Min said.
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Into this disaster ride Wu, of Stanford’s Department of Civil and Environmental Engineering, and his team, beared hundreds of common mealworms that were raised from birth on a diet of nothing but styrofoam. Even with so many of us doing our bit to help out with recycling, the amount of unrecyclable and discarded plastics in the USA 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).
“Our findings have opened a new door to solve the global plastic pollution problem,” Wu said. Understanding how bacteria within mealworms carry out this feat could potentially enable new options for safe management of plastic waste.
The two papers were published this month in Environmental Science and Technology. Hopefully they can breed more ravenous strains, or perhaps study the gut bacteria in the worms that might lead to a breakthrough where managing plastic waste is concerned.
Another area of research could involve searching for a marine equivalent of the mealworm to digest plastics, Criddle said. Craig Criddle, of Stanford Univ. “Sometimes science surprises us”. Together, the mealworms consumed between 34 and 39 milligrams of the stuff per day-comparable to about the weight of an aspirin-converting about 50 percent of it into carbon dioxide just as they would with any food.
With new evidence of the mealworm’s plastic-eating capabilities, scientists plan to study whether the microorganisms living inside the worm’s gut can breakdown polypropylene, another form of plastic used to make things such as certain vehicle parts, textiles and microbeads.
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Researchers from Stanford University have been working with researchers from China on a novel way to help remove Styrofoam plastic that is found in landfills around the world. The humble mealworm – which turns out to be not so humble after all. Previous investigations have shown that marine life, such as seabirds and turtles, mistake larger pieces of plastic floating at the surface for food. The research will require scientists to look into the enzymes that break down polymers, in order to determine how to best degrade the plastics – and maybe guide manufacturers in designing polymers that break down more easily. Chemical and Physical Characterization and Isotopic Tests” and “Biodegradation and Mineralization of Polystyrene by Plastic-Eating Mealworms. 2.
