At Last Plastic Eating Worms Came Into Existence - Plastic Problem's Will Be Solved

Plastics are always an unsolved problem to our environment. But at last the problem is solved by the discovery of plastic eating worms.

 The wax worm’s potential was discovered by accident when biologist Federica Bertocchini cleaned out her hives and temporarily placed the parasites in a plastic shopping bag. Bertocchini is a part-time beekeeper, and is used to removing wax worms from her hives, where the caterpillars like to munch on the beeswax inside. After leaving a recently evicted troupe of wax worms in a plastic bag one day, Bertocchini found that the worms simply ate their way out.

Bertocchini was curious as to whether the centimeter-long wax worms were actively digesting the bag’s plastic, or just chewing through it. She confirmed that they were, by mashing the creatures into a paste and applying it to a plastic film, which slowly degraded.

Bertocchini, a researcher at the Spanish National Research Council, and scientists at Cambridge University, to investigate the feeding habits of the centimeter-long Galleria mellonella grubs. In lab tests, they discovered that 100 worms can devour 92 milligrams of polyethylene in as little as 12 hours.

With further research, the scientists hope to identify the enzymes that the wax worms produce when they go to work on a bag. The genes for these might then be put into bacteria, such as E coli, or into marine organisms called phytoplankton, and used to degrade plastics in the wild.

Published in the journal Current Biology, the study says it is likely that digesting the beeswax found in hives involves breaking down similar types of chemical bonds.

Paolo Bombelli, a biochemist at Cambridge who took part in the study, said the finding could lead to a solution to the plastic waste mounting up in waterways, oceans and landfills.