Strange worm eats plastic waste

Wax worms can turn plastic bags into shreds in just a few hours.

Waxworms eat away plastic bags in just a few hours

Federica Bertocchini, a scientist at the University of Cantabria in Spain and an amateur beekeeper, discovered the wax worms’ incredible ability to eat plastic waste while tending to her beehives. The worms are used as bait for fish, but they are also pests in beehives, chewing holes in the waxy combs. Bertocchini put the worms in a polyethylene supermarket bag when she picked them up from the hive. Less than an hour later, the bag was riddled with holes, according to the International Business Times.

Bertocchini brought the worms into the lab to study their behavior in the bags. Working with scientists at the University of Cambridge in the UK, she discovered that the wax worms weren’t just chewing holes in plastic bags, they were actually eating the plastic and breaking it down into other compounds.

100 worms chewed through 92 mg of plastic in about 12 hours, leaving the ultralight bag in shreds. They broke down the plastic into ethylene glycol, an antifreeze. The study was published in the journal Current Biology.

"There is a chemical change in the polymer. This tells us that this is not simply a mechanical chewing behavior of the waxworm," said study co-author Paolo Bombelli, a researcher at the University of Cambridge.

The wax worm is the only known insect that can break down polyethylene in this way. The researchers are not sure exactly how the wax worm works. It may be the worm itself or the bacteria that live in its gut that break down the plastic. The team also crushed the worms and spread the slime onto plastic bags to see if it still had the ability to break down the plastic into antifreeze. The worm slime was still effective, but not as effective as live worms.

“We were excited to see that the mucus could still break down plastic,” Bombelli said. “This tells us that there might be enzymatic activity that breaks down polyethylene. This is a great finding because we really hope to identify the enzyme. If we do, then we can extract the enzyme from other organisms like yeast or E. coli bacteria, and use it on an industrial scale.”

Yeast or bacteria may be more effective than worms at breaking down plastic on a large scale, but worms can also be used. However, ethylene glycol is toxic to many species, including humans, so releasing wax worms into landfills is not a good solution. But the wax worms appear healthy after eating plastic bags and can metamorphose into wax.

The team has a few more steps to go before using wax worms to tackle the mountains of plastic waste that end up in landfills every year. “One of the main questions we’re trying to answer is whether the plastic is broken down by the wax worms themselves, by bacteria in their guts, or by a combination of both,” Bombelli says.

A trillion plastic bags are used every year. Polyethylene accounts for about 92% of all plastic bags produced. An organism that can break down this compound without harm has the potential to revolutionize waste management. Currently, billions of kilograms of plastic end up in the ocean, accumulating toxins in wildlife that accidentally eat the trash.

According to VNE