Friday, October 02, 2015


Worms Eat Plastic



(Stanford University and Beihang University)
Even with so many of us doing our bit to help out with recycling, the amount of unrecyclable and discarded plastics in the US alone comes close to 30 million tonnes annually, thanks to things like disposable coffee cups (2.5 billion of which are thrown away by Americans every year).[…]

Researchers led by Stanford University in US and Beihang University in China found that the mealworm – the larval form of the darkling beetle – can safely subsist on a diet of Styrofoam and other kinds of polystyrene, with bacteria in the worm’s gut biodegrading the plastic as part of its digestive process.
Previously, Styrofoam and other plastics were considered non-biodegradable.

1 comment:

Doom said...

Yes, but then who will eat the worms! There is N.K., Cuba, and a few others, I suppose.

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