We produced 414 million tons of plastic in 2023, so you’re gonna need an ungodly amount of worms.
The real problem with plastic isn’t that it’s impossible to dispose of or recycle, it’s that it’s massively cheaper to just make new plastic and landfill the old stuff – or chuck it in the ocean.
Every headline about something that sounds revolutionary, like “plastic eating worms”, comes with caveats or downright falsehoods. Pop science reporting, whether it’s physics or biology or sustainability, consistently writes bullshit clickbait articles.
This is not limited to pop science reporting, but let’s stick to the topic at hand.
In this case, you still need to sort out the right kinds of plastic (of which there are only a few), then maintain an entire healthy worm colony of industrial proportions, feeding them plastic at the exact right rate and still dealing with the resultant biowaste. Oh, and don’t underfeed them either.
At the end of the day, most plastics that we can biodegrade, we can burn just as easily. If we don’t, it is an issue of economics, not technology. It is simply not worth the money to do so.
“Your scientists were so preoccupied with whether or not they could, they didn’t stop to think if they should.”
What happens when the worms start eating plastic we don’t want them to eat, what happens when they infest hospitals and power infrastructure and food packaging?
Mother nature has an amazing ability to adapt and overcome limitations or impositions put on it, but there is rarely a convenient way to make it adapt in just the way you want it to. You make a bug that survives by eating plastic and it’s going to find a way to survive eating whatever plastic it wants.
Worm can only eat very specific plastics, and our recycling process finds sorting the most difficult part of recycling.
It was a small experiment in a lab. Scaling something from a lab where it is extremely unprofitable, to industrial scale where it is profitable, is always difficult, and often impossible.
Pop science sometimes is a dis-service to science, as it makes vast promises, that this is the next big thing, while glossing over the process of taking something from the lab and scaling it to an industrial scale
There isn’t one “plastic”.
Mealworms (Probably the ones you’re thinking of?) eat specifically polystyrene (often in the form of Styrofoam) but it takes them a while to do it.
There’s also a caterpillar that eats… whatever it is that sandwich bags are made of. PETE, iirc? They’re also not very efficient.
There’s also a bacteria that eats nylon.
The main problem for using these life forms for plastic disposal is that it is expensive and inefficient. You need to house and care for and clean up after millions upon millions of worms, which is doable but non-trivial. Even after all that, you still have all the ABS and HDPE and LDPE and vinyl and PVC and acrylics and all the other plastics I’m not gonna bother to look up that we’d have to deal with.
I’ve seen other commenters touch on parts of this, but no one is addressing the whole thing, so I will.
First, “plastic” is a very broad term encompassing a large number of artificial organic polymers. Two of the most common are polyethylene and polystyrene. There are many more polymers than just these two. The matter is further complicated by a large number of additives, which affect how they have to be processed to properly dispose of them.
Second, there are two worms which are known to eat plastic, the mealworm and the waxworm. The mealworm is the larva of a beetle (Tenebrio molitor) and hosts microorganisms in its gut, which can break down polystyrene. The waxworm is the larva of a moth (Galleria mellonella) and secretes an enzyme in its saliva which works with microorganisms in its gut to break down polyethylene. Breeding these things on an industrial scale requires providing a suitable environment for every stage of its life cycle. This is VERY difficult to do on a large scale.
Third, why not harvest the worms for their gut microbes and grow those instead? We likely can’t. Approximately 99% of all microorganisms are considered biological dark matter. They have never been successfully cultured and are only known to exist because of the genetic material they leave behind. It would be very expensive to try and culture something we don’t even know if we can culture, particularly because we don’t even know which microbe or microbes we need.
Fourth, what about all the other plastics? Good news, there is almost guaranteed to be a microbe which can metabolize a given plastic. It is generally considered that for any given organic compound, there exists a microbe which can metabolize it. Bad news, almost all of them can’t be cultured with current techniques (see point 3). We don’t even know of a specific microbe for most plastics.
In conclusion, growing enough worms is incredibly difficult. Growing the microbes instead is probably impossible and subject to likely insurmountable obstacles if it is possible. All the other plastics are still a problem even if we can manage the worm solution for two of them.
I wrote my thesis on this to graduate undergrad – A basic rundown is that mealworms (tenebrio molitor) contain a non-specific mechanism to break down plastics in their gut. Where the mechanism is from is not exactly pinpointed, but at the time (2020) there were a few known species of bacteria in their gut flora that were almost certainly the reason for their ability to break down plastics. The frass (poop) from the worms does not indicate any detectable plastic toxins when analyzed with mass spec, but this data seemed to come mostly from the breakdown of polystyrene by the worms. Almost all the literature at the time was only about the works ability to digest polystyrene.
Mealworms however are limited by their mandibles for what waste they can break down. These worms can eat styrofoam easily because it is soft. They cannot eat bottles because they are too hard.
I half assed the paper in 2020 so im sure there is more literature now around the topic. But at the end of the day, it doesn’t seem like the most logical avenue to deal with the massive amounts of plastic waste.
There is actually a way to recycle plastic now but nobody cares. All people have to do is place the plastic item in a recycling bin but, sorry, that’s too much work for 99% of people. So what good is another way to recycle plastic? People still won’t do it.
Running out of space to store used plastic is not a priority environmental problem. Gathering all the plastic waste in one place is difficult enough as it is.
Collecting it is the hard part, because so much is dropped where it was used, or flushed down a drain, or carried on the wind…
Plastic is a material property. While we like to think of plastic as a single type of material, it actually consists of thousands of different materials. Maybe a worm could eat some kinds, but it can not eat every kind.
Comments
We produced 414 million tons of plastic in 2023, so you’re gonna need an ungodly amount of worms.
The real problem with plastic isn’t that it’s impossible to dispose of or recycle, it’s that it’s massively cheaper to just make new plastic and landfill the old stuff – or chuck it in the ocean.
Every headline about something that sounds revolutionary, like “plastic eating worms”, comes with caveats or downright falsehoods. Pop science reporting, whether it’s physics or biology or sustainability, consistently writes bullshit clickbait articles.
This is not limited to pop science reporting, but let’s stick to the topic at hand.
In this case, you still need to sort out the right kinds of plastic (of which there are only a few), then maintain an entire healthy worm colony of industrial proportions, feeding them plastic at the exact right rate and still dealing with the resultant biowaste. Oh, and don’t underfeed them either.
At the end of the day, most plastics that we can biodegrade, we can burn just as easily. If we don’t, it is an issue of economics, not technology. It is simply not worth the money to do so.
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“Your scientists were so preoccupied with whether or not they could, they didn’t stop to think if they should.”
What happens when the worms start eating plastic we don’t want them to eat, what happens when they infest hospitals and power infrastructure and food packaging?
Mother nature has an amazing ability to adapt and overcome limitations or impositions put on it, but there is rarely a convenient way to make it adapt in just the way you want it to. You make a bug that survives by eating plastic and it’s going to find a way to survive eating whatever plastic it wants.
https://www.uq.edu.au/news/article/2022/06/superworms-capable-of-munching-through-plastic-waste
OR
https://www.microbiologyresearch.org/content/journal/mgen/10.1099/mgen.0.000842
I think this is what you might be referring to. Basically, more research is needed.
The worm still shits out micro plastics.
Worm can’t survive on plastic alone.
Worm can only eat very specific plastics, and our recycling process finds sorting the most difficult part of recycling.
It was a small experiment in a lab. Scaling something from a lab where it is extremely unprofitable, to industrial scale where it is profitable, is always difficult, and often impossible.
Pop science sometimes is a dis-service to science, as it makes vast promises, that this is the next big thing, while glossing over the process of taking something from the lab and scaling it to an industrial scale
There isn’t one “plastic”.
Mealworms (Probably the ones you’re thinking of?) eat specifically polystyrene (often in the form of Styrofoam) but it takes them a while to do it.
There’s also a caterpillar that eats… whatever it is that sandwich bags are made of. PETE, iirc? They’re also not very efficient.
There’s also a bacteria that eats nylon.
The main problem for using these life forms for plastic disposal is that it is expensive and inefficient. You need to house and care for and clean up after millions upon millions of worms, which is doable but non-trivial. Even after all that, you still have all the ABS and HDPE and LDPE and vinyl and PVC and acrylics and all the other plastics I’m not gonna bother to look up that we’d have to deal with.
[removed]
I’ve seen other commenters touch on parts of this, but no one is addressing the whole thing, so I will.
First, “plastic” is a very broad term encompassing a large number of artificial organic polymers. Two of the most common are polyethylene and polystyrene. There are many more polymers than just these two. The matter is further complicated by a large number of additives, which affect how they have to be processed to properly dispose of them.
Second, there are two worms which are known to eat plastic, the mealworm and the waxworm. The mealworm is the larva of a beetle (Tenebrio molitor) and hosts microorganisms in its gut, which can break down polystyrene. The waxworm is the larva of a moth (Galleria mellonella) and secretes an enzyme in its saliva which works with microorganisms in its gut to break down polyethylene. Breeding these things on an industrial scale requires providing a suitable environment for every stage of its life cycle. This is VERY difficult to do on a large scale.
Third, why not harvest the worms for their gut microbes and grow those instead? We likely can’t. Approximately 99% of all microorganisms are considered biological dark matter. They have never been successfully cultured and are only known to exist because of the genetic material they leave behind. It would be very expensive to try and culture something we don’t even know if we can culture, particularly because we don’t even know which microbe or microbes we need.
Fourth, what about all the other plastics? Good news, there is almost guaranteed to be a microbe which can metabolize a given plastic. It is generally considered that for any given organic compound, there exists a microbe which can metabolize it. Bad news, almost all of them can’t be cultured with current techniques (see point 3). We don’t even know of a specific microbe for most plastics.
In conclusion, growing enough worms is incredibly difficult. Growing the microbes instead is probably impossible and subject to likely insurmountable obstacles if it is possible. All the other plastics are still a problem even if we can manage the worm solution for two of them.
It’s pretty easy.
Those plastic eating worms, they don’t make the plastic magically disappear. They’re like shredders. Big plastic in, small plastic out.
I wrote my thesis on this to graduate undergrad – A basic rundown is that mealworms (tenebrio molitor) contain a non-specific mechanism to break down plastics in their gut. Where the mechanism is from is not exactly pinpointed, but at the time (2020) there were a few known species of bacteria in their gut flora that were almost certainly the reason for their ability to break down plastics. The frass (poop) from the worms does not indicate any detectable plastic toxins when analyzed with mass spec, but this data seemed to come mostly from the breakdown of polystyrene by the worms. Almost all the literature at the time was only about the works ability to digest polystyrene.
Mealworms however are limited by their mandibles for what waste they can break down. These worms can eat styrofoam easily because it is soft. They cannot eat bottles because they are too hard.
I half assed the paper in 2020 so im sure there is more literature now around the topic. But at the end of the day, it doesn’t seem like the most logical avenue to deal with the massive amounts of plastic waste.
There is actually a way to recycle plastic now but nobody cares. All people have to do is place the plastic item in a recycling bin but, sorry, that’s too much work for 99% of people. So what good is another way to recycle plastic? People still won’t do it.
Running out of space to store used plastic is not a priority environmental problem. Gathering all the plastic waste in one place is difficult enough as it is.
Collecting it is the hard part, because so much is dropped where it was used, or flushed down a drain, or carried on the wind…
Worms can’t eat all plastics, and scaling it is risky.
Whoops.. they just devoured most of my tv, and computer, and my car is missing like 40% now.. someone stop these things.
Plastic is a material property. While we like to think of plastic as a single type of material, it actually consists of thousands of different materials. Maybe a worm could eat some kinds, but it can not eat every kind.