I am quite sure by now that most of us would know that plastic bags is not something that we would like to use to carry our purchases whenever we go shopping, no thanks to the fact that they degrade extremely slowly, making it a huge issue when plenty of it is dumped into landfills annually, with the rest ending up in the ocean, killing turtles that think it is jellyfish along the way. Perhaps there is a better way of getting rid of plastic in a greener way – as researchers at Stanford have figured out that mealworms could be used to speed up the process of breaking down styrofoam and different kinds of polystyrene. Apparently, these mealworms are able to digest polystyrene – and survive on polystyrene alone, now how about that?
Wei-Min Wu, a senior research engineer at the Department of Civil and Environmental Engineering, realized that the larvae of the darkling beetle do carry microorganisms in their digestive tracts which will enable them to break down the plastic after eating them. The resulting worm waste is said to be safe to use as soil on crops, which is another advantage.
The only drawback? The process is painfully slow, where 100 mealworms are hungry enough to consume 34 to 39 milligrams of polystyrene each day, which is roughly the weight of a tiny pill. 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.
Filed in . Read more about Science. Source: treehugger