Current Events > Plastic-eating worm which could end pollution - BBC Africa

(+) Yeah! (+)

Despite producing only 5% of the world's plastic Africa is now the world's second most plastic-polluted continent. According to the UN half of all plastic produced worldwide is for single use contributing to over 400 million tonnes of plastic waste each year. Kenyan scientists from the International Centre of Insect Physiology and Ecology have made an interesting discovery about an insect. The larvae of the darkling beetle species native to Africa can digest plastic in their guts, could this tiny creature be part of the solution?

Produce sextillion of these things and dump them across the land and ocean. Not like we are going to stop using plastic anyway.

inb4 they try to eat us because we're full of microplastics

inb4 they try to eat us because we're full of microplastics

fyi, the plan isn't to breed a bunch of waxworms, but rather to study the enzymes they produce to hopefully someday oxidize and break down plastic on a larger scale

There will never be enough mealworms to solve this problem, but this discovery is fantastic.

Trump would suggest swallowing them like he did bleach during Covid

There's a manga about creatures we generally engineered to eat trash escaping from their containment and started eating humans instead. Forgot the name.

Found it. It's Bio-Meat: Nectar

Ok but what do they pooped out?
If they can digest plastics into degradable material, why not we research whatever it have and reproduce it on our own?

That's the goal. They aren't trying to mass breed these worms to outpace our plastic waste. That would be infeasible. But if they can figure out the chemical process these worms use to break down the plastics and then reproduce that, then there might be a way to mitigate some of the harms our massive plastic use is doing to the world.

So this all good till it gets out of control. Then we have vehicles that just fail, your implants being full of worms, or just worms eating living people.

still cool to see though

Why don't we just start dumping it in volcanoes.

does it work, though?

this sort of stuff has come up before, but last few times i've read about the concept the issue is that it just turns plastics into microplastics

@M1Astray could this help?

Not all heroes wear capes

Depends on what the goal is. Will it probably do anything this half of the century? Probably not. Definitely won't be involved in the fight to save the world's climate.

Could it be important much further down the road, assuming humans have survived the coming two to three decades with civilization relatively intact (and thus retaining scientific production) to help prevent acidification of the ocean? I'm not informed enough on the topic to say yes or no to that but I'd wager it's an avenue worth funding research on.

This isn't the first time I've seen news about plastic-eating things recently though, a few weeks back I saw a news article about how some algae at the bottom of the ocean appeared to be eating plastics.