Could Worms Be the Much Needed Solution to Our Plastic Problem?

The world’s plastic production is becoming a growing concern every year. Could these worms help?

This image shows a wax worm chewing a hole through plastic. Polyethylene debris can be seen attached to the caterpillar.

(Photo Courtesy: Federica Bertocchini, Paolo Bombelli, and Chris Howe)

Ninety percent of the world’s total plastic production is not recycled, a 2017 National Geographic report revealed. A study by Plasticseurope.org shows that global plastic production stood at 335 million metric tonnes in 2016. To put this into context, plastic takes more than 400 years to degrade.

All is not lost, however. European scientists think they may have found a solution – a worm that can chew sizable holes in a plastic shopping bag within 40 minutes.

A Heartening Discovery

This study was led by Federica Bertocchini, a developmental biologist at the University of Cantabria in Spain, National Geographic reports. In 2015, Bertocchini noticed that some wax worms that she had placed in a plastic bag had made small holes in the bag.

In order to understand how this was possible, Bertocchini got together with Paolo Bombelli and Chris Howe, two other scientists. During their experiments, that they describe in a study published in April 2017, they noticed that 100 of these worms were able to degrade about 92 milligrams within 12 hours, or roughly 3 percent of it, according to Scientific American.

According to The Economist, such bags weigh about three grams – so if 100 larvae may consume one bag a month.

A wax worm chews a hole through plastic. Polyethylene debris can be seen attached to the caterpillar.(Photo courtesy: Federica Bertocchini, Paolo Bombelli, and Chris Howe)

According to Bertocchini, beeswax, the larvae’s ability to break down their dietary staple, is the reason they can degrade plastic.

The effect of these worms was much more heartening than previous attempts to use organisms to breakdown plastic. Before this, bacterium called Nocardia asteroides had displayed positive results – by taking over six months to obliterate a film of plastic half millimetre thick.

In Search of a Solution

Despite positive results from this experiment, scientists are not sure whether unleashing wax worms on the plastic of the world is the best way to deal with the problem.

There are still many questions that need to be answered in this regard: whether these worms produce toxic waste, how long they can function as means of plastic-disposal and what nutrients would be needed to sustain them, The Economist reported.

This image shows a wax worm chewing a hole through plastic. Polyethylene debris can be seen attached to the caterpillar. (Photo courtesy: Federica Bertocchini, Paolo Bombelli, and Chris Howe)

Marine biologist Tracy Mincer told National Geographic that the better solution is to simply produce less plastic. Scientific American reported that while Bertocchini and her team hope that their findings may help in dealing with the plastic problem, they too believe the solution would be to harness the enzyme in some way and use that in a more industrial process, instead of just the worms themselves.

(This article is being republished for World Environment Day on 5 June, it was originally published on 20 May, 2018)

(With inputs from The Economist, Scientific American and National Geographic.)