Is there a cure for white pollution? There is a kind of insect that can eat plastic!
Xinhua Beijing, April 26, according to statistics, the world produces about 80 million tons of polyethylene every year for shopping bags and food bags and other daily necessities. However, it takes hundreds of years for polyethylene to be completely degraded.
In Europe alone, polyethylene makes up 40% of all plastic products. Across the European Union, 38% of plastic goes straight to landfill. This poses a serious hazard to the ecological environment, especially Marine life.
Now, Spanish and British researchers have made a surprising discovery about how quickly plastic degrades. The larvae of the wax borer, considered a pest by the beekeeping industry, can actually eat and digest polyethylene.Researchers believe the discovery could be the key to tackling plastic pollution, according to the BBC.
According to Agence France-Presse reported on the 24th, Federica Bertochini, a biologist at the Institute of Biomedicine and Biotechnology in Cantafuria, Spain, made the discovery by chance at home.
She likes beekeeping when cleaning the beehive, with a plastic bag to steal in which to eat beeswax bugs packed together, did not expect "after a while, I saw the bag is full of holes, bugs crawling everywhere."
Surprised by the "fighting power" of the caterwarer larvae, Bertochini teamed up with biochemist Paul Bombelli's team at the University of Cambridge in England to study the larvae to determine how quickly and how much environmentally harmful plastic they can consume.
The larvae of the wax borer were originally used only as bait for fishing. In their first experiment, the researchers placed hundreds of worms on a plastic bag. Within 40 minutes, small holes had begun to appear in the bag. After 12 hours, the bugs had eaten 92 milligrams of the plastic, a much faster rate of biodegradation than with fungi and bacteria.
A second experiment confirmed that the larvae were able to digest the plastic meal completely and break down its chemical components.
The third experiment was even more striking: a similar result was obtained when mashed larvae were placed on a plastic bag, suggesting that an enzyme or other specific substance in the larvae was a plastic Nemesis.
Bertochini thinks the plastic-digesting substance could be produced by the larvae 'salivary glands, or by symbiotic bacteria in their guts.However, it is not clear whether the substance is a single enzyme or a multi-molecular compound.
Explaining how the larvae can digest plastic, Bertochini said that the moth traditionally feeds on beeswax, a polymer that is "the plastic of nature" and has a chemical structure that is "very similar" to polyethylene.
To combat plastic pollution, Bertocchini said, "Putting millions of larvae on plastic bags is definitely not feasible." Researchers still need to identify the specific substance that breaks down plastic and produce the active agent from it.
The study has been published in the journal Current Biology. "We plan to translate this finding into an effective solution to plastic waste, saving our oceans, rivers and entire environments from the inevitable consequences of plastic accumulation," the researchers wrote in their paper.
"However, just because we know how to biodegrade polyethylene, we should not intentionally dispose of it into the environment," the article added. (Reporter Haiyang, Xinhua International Client reporting)