Each year, over 496 million tons of plastic enter our world, from consumer-facing packaging and products to industrial machinery and commercial parts. But when that plastic — much of which is only used a single time — is discarded, it doesn't simply go away.
Instead, plastic pollution has escalated as the material continues to accumulate everywhere from our oceans to our bloodstreams, our food, our soil, and our ecosystems. The issue has reached emergency status, with many environmental and public health advocates labeling it as a crisis.
"Plastics increasingly contaminate all environments and living organisms, and pose serious risks that scientists are only beginning to understand, but that will have long-lasting detrimental impact on the planet," the Wyss Institute at Harvard University explained.
Yet despite the overwhelming scope of the threat, one research team at Brandon University in Canada has been quietly investigating an unusual, yet potentially game-changing, means of dealing with plastic pollution: eating it.
Interesting Engineering reported on the research, which uses a specific type of caterpillar known as waxworms — the caterpillars of the greater wax moth — to degrade and digest polyethylene plastic. This is the most common type of plastic found around the world, with over 100 million tons manufactured each year to make everything from packaging to grocery bags.
"Around 2,000 waxworms can break down an entire polyethylene bag in as little as 24 hours," lead researcher Dr. Bryan Cassone shared. "Although we believe that co-supplementation with feeding stimulants like sugars can reduce the number of worms considerably."
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Typically, it can take hundreds of years for plastic to degrade, and when it does, it simply breaks into microplastics that further contaminate the environment. The "plastivore" worms, on the other hand, convert the plastics into lipids stored as body fat.
Unfortunately, an all-plastic diet is — perhaps unsurprisingly — fatal to the waxworms.
"It is processed as a fat, but they do not receive other essential nutrients necessary to complete development," Cassone told Interesting Engineering. "We have attempted to breed caterpillars over multiple generations that can be sustained exclusively on plastic, but have not yet been successful."
However, he explained that through co-supplementation with other food sources, this could still be part of a sustainable solution to the plastic problem.
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Stricter regulations on companies 🏛️ "We could mass rear waxworms on a co-supplemented polyethylene diet as part of a circular economy," he said.
Or, if researchers are unable to sustain the plastivore populations, they could potentially work to replicate them synthetically in a lab. They would do this by "identifying the exact biological mechanisms and enzymes responsible and then potentially using them in industrial processes without the worms themselves," IE explained.
Other companies and labs are exploring similar processes, including plastic-eating fungi and bacteria, as well as these waxworms. And while plastivores likely won't be able to reverse the accumulation of plastic pollution on a global scale, they could offer an important and low-impact way to help tackle the problem.
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