Plastic pollution is everywhere. Despite our best efforts to recycle, the problem has remained acute.
It is reported that a from of waxworm is now offering a new hope in the fight against such pollution. Researchers have deicovered that the greater wax moth loves eat plastic and they are now studying the way diegests it for answers on how to cope with universal plastic problem.
"Nature is providing us with a great starting point to model how to effectively bioderagde plastic," said biologist and study author Christophe LeMoine. "But we still have a few more puzzles to slove before using this technology, so it's probably best to keep reducing plastic waste while this gets figured out."
LeMoine and his team came across one partitular species of bacteria from the waxworms' gut that could survive on nothing but plastic for a year. They further discovered a "very close working relationship" between the waxworm and its gut microorganisms. Although both can digest plastic on their own, together they do this much faster.
The researchers attributed this process to the fact that these waxworms are used to eating honeycomb wax. This wax is made up of very long chains of carbon and hydrogen molecules which also form plastics.
"The waxworm and its gut bacteria must break down these long chains (in honeycomb)," LeMoine said. And assumably, because plastic are similar in structure, they can also adopt this machinery to use plastics as a nutrient source."
Now the scientists are hoping that understanding how these waxworms and their gut bacteria function could pave the way to new solutions for dealing with our ever-growing plastic problem.
