CAN WORMS CLEAN UP OUR ENVIRONMENT FROM PLASTIC? – Waxworms & Plastic Bags

 

plastic is one of the chief enemies of the natural world, in the marine climate, they are usually confused with food like scrumptious jellyfish, and an extraordinary assortment of creatures like birds, whales, seals, and turtles, can gag to death, pass on from starvation or diseases since they have ingested plastics. Numerous critters additionally get snared in plastic and bundling drifting in the seas, which can cause them wounds, starvation, and even demise, but we seem addicted to the stuff. It makes things cheap and disposable. Plastic can be great. It’s durable, flexible, and used in everything from medical equipment to floss.  Some plastic is light and transparent like plastic bags others are extremely resistant like bulletproof, Styrofoam, acrylic sheets, polypropylene, and vests what they all have in common is their polymers which are just basically means they're materials that are made up of repeating atomic units.

But, unfortunately, most plastics either don’t or take a very long time to break down. Most plastics are made from processes like heating petroleum, this rearranges the molecules so it becomes polypropylene, forged together by strong carbon-carbon bonds. These strong bonds are hard to break apart, and because it takes a lot of energy to make molecules like polypropylene, nature doesn’t break them down by itself.

Kenneth Peters, a natural geochemist at Stanford University, said that "Nature doesn't make things like that, so organic entities have never seen that."

But there is some good news two studies published in the journal of Environmental Science and Technology suggest the creepy worms including waxworms & mealworms to the rescue! The researchers found that the mealworm has microbes in their guts that can break down the foam.

How?

these worms are accomplishing something that we generally believed was unthinkable. they are degrading the non-degradable dig and eating the non-digestible. Well by feeding them nothing but the nasty stuff i.e. plastic bags and things made of plastic materials. this is how they reduced a piece of styrofoam in just a month if we could harvest their superpower we could get rid of our plastic trash in months rather than centuries they could save countless species help clean the environment and avoid toxic plastic incinerations.

     

But they're not big eaters, 100 worms ate about 34 and 39 milligrams a day! After digesting the stuff, the worms released half as carbon dioxide and pooped out the other half as little pellets. Early results say that the pellets might safe enough to use as soil!

Research on Worms

Earlier studies also published in the Journal of Environmental Science & Technology found other microbes that could help. These microbes live in the guts of another worm. These microbes chow down on polyethylene, the most common plastic; it's often used in packaging, plastic bags, cups, plates, disposable items (which is very helpful in the corona), and the list goes on. But these worms aren’t alone in their dining habits, there’s a fungus in the rainforests

Researchers described in the journal of Applied and Environmental Microbiology, that the fungus Pestalotiopsis microspora could survive on polyurethane alone. And the researchers say there could be lots of other fungus species that could be great bioremediation candidates, but we just haven’t found them yet.

Plastic Eating Bacteria – Research

For the past ten years, MIT hosts a competition that encourages students to design a living cell. Yeah, you heard that right, design. Every year students from all over the world try their hand at genetic engineering in The International Genetically Engineered Machine (iGEM) Competition. While not all students try to make bacteria that eat plastic, in 2013 a group of students at UC Davis tried creating bacteria that would eat a type of plastic called PET. But genetic engineering can be controversial. What happens if you release it into the wild? We don’t know if or how the new organism might mutate, or how it could become an invasive species. And as for more “natural” bacteria, it’s not a silver bullet solution. We should be very cautious before we go spraying bacteria and fungus over everything plastic. We have no idea how these kinds of organisms could handle a new environment. There’s a real fear they could TAKE OVER. Like the fungus from the rainforest? So it’s clear more research is needed, but researchers are on the right track. Until a perfect solution is found, maybe we should keep plastic out of landfills and out of the environment with the old standby of reducing, reusing, and recycling.

can plastic-eating worms/bugs help solve our plastic problem?

Plastics have transformed the world they created our modern world a world that is safer more hygienic more colorful than the world that came before.

We can't just break the ocean with enzymes so this technology can't help with the plastic already in the environment however it could revolutionize our recycling system to something you have to break down to its basic elements so that you can rearrange them into something else but because we can't break down plastic bonds we can reuse it more than once before it becomes unusable and that is the reason these worms can be a distinct advantage assuming that you contemplate bio-reusing what you can do is take that plastic break it down into its components again and reuse it again and again and again infinitely, in fact, it sounds like sci-fi, but it's already underway, for example, a French company named Carbios is already using enzymes to recycle bottles.