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Environment & Energy
Related: About this forumThere's a Creepy-Crawly Solution for a World Drowning in Styrofoam
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Scientists discover that mealworms can digest the indigestiblethe plastic polluting the planet.
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(Photo: Charles Mann/Getty Images)
http://www.takepart.com/article/2015/10/05/worms-could-be-key-cleaning-plastic-pollution
OCT 5, 2015 Katharine Gammon has written for Nature, Wired , Discover, and Popular Science. A new mom, she lives in Santa Monica.
Forget diamondsStyrofoam is forever.
The polystyrene packaging that cushioned your latest online order for delivery may well sit in landfills for many decades without degrading. How big is the problem? Americans throw out 2.5 billion Styrofoam cups alone each year.
But researchers have now confirmed for the first time that mealworms can biodegrade petroleum-based plastic in just days, thanks to bacteria in their gut. The mealworm is the larvae of the darkling beetle, and it can survive on a diet of Styrofoam and other types of polystyrene.
People talk about how Styrofoam takes decades to biodegrade, said Wei-Min Wu, a senior research engineer at Stanford University and the coauthor of two new papers on mealworms and plastic published in the journal Environmental Science and Technology. But we are confident there is a fast degradation, so this could eventually lead to a breakthrough for rapidly breaking down plastic in the environment.
FULL story at link.
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There's a Creepy-Crawly Solution for a World Drowning in Styrofoam (Original Post)
Omaha Steve
Oct 2015
OP
yeoman6987
(14,449 posts)1. This is great. Start feeding them.
Gosh they will never have to search for food now. See everything has a purpose. Now when you drink that hot chocolate in the styrofoam cup at least you know you will be doing some good for the earth. This is actually an incredible breakthrough. See everything is not doom and gloom.
Now if they can eat plastic bags we are really in good shape!
Thank you scientists for a huge step in fixing our planet.
hunter
(38,264 posts)2. This is interesting, something that one might experiment with at home.
Unfortunately it reminded me me of that Dr. Who episode, The Green Death, where the bad guys were dumping toxic waste into the old mine...