Plastics (Photo : Reuters)
Two companion studies made by engineers at Stanford University possibly has a solution to non-biodegradable materials such as plastic and Styrofoam that are dumped daily in landfills. Their answer is the mealworm, or the larvae form of the beetle darkling.
Phys.org reports that the mealworm could live on a diet of Styrofoam and other forms of polystyrene. According to Wei-Min Wu, senior research engineer at Stanford's Department of Civil and Environmental Engineering, microorganisms in the worms' guts biodegrade the plastic.
"Our findings have opened a new door to solve the global plastic pollution problem," says Wu, co-author of the research published in Environmental Science and Technology journal. In the US alone, 2.5 billion plastic foam cups and 22 million tonnes of plastic are thrown away yearly. Less than 10 percent is recycled, and the rest is the headache of local, state and the federal governments.
Wei-Min's team, supervised by Craig Criddle, professor of civil and environmental engineering at Stanford, made 100 mealworms in the lab eat 34 to 39 milligrammes of Styrofoam daily. That volume is equivalent to the weight of a small pill.
Within 24 hours, the mealworms excreted the majority of the plastic as biodegraded pieces similar in appearance to rabbit faeces. The mealworms on plastic diet were as healthy as those that had normal diet of bran, reports NBC. The waste of the plastic-fed mealworm also appear to be safe to use as soil for crops, Wei-Min said.
The Stanford researches have partnered with scientists from the Beihang University in China to study if microorganisms in the mealworm and other insects could biodegrade plastics, microbeads and bioplastics. Criddle adds that they would also look for a marine equivalent of the mealworms, which is timely amid recent reports that a lot of fish and other marine life have been ingesting so much plastic thrown in oceans, rivers and other bodies of water.
