Foam-Eating Worms May Offer Solution To Mounting Waste

ckwu writes: Polystyrene foams—including products like Styrofoam—are rarely recycled, and the materials biodegrade so slowly that they can sit in a landfill for hundreds of years. But a pair of new studies shows that mealworms will dine on polystyrene foam when they can't get a better meal, converting almost half of what they eat into carbon dioxide. In one study, the researchers fed mealworms polystyrene foam and found that the critters converted about 48% of the carbon they ate into carbon dioxide and excreted 49% in their feces. In the second study, the researchers showed that bacteria in the mealworms' guts were responsible for breaking down the polystyrene--suggesting that engineering bacteria might be a strategy for boosting the reported biodegradation.

Comments

Re:burn it

[whyloginwhysubscribe]

Because of the toxic chemicals which are released when it is burnt - http://www.ehow.co.uk/info_831... - although this article says that if you burn it hot enough it is safe - it doesn't say *how* safe...

That's all good and well.

[idbeholda]

But congress is notoriously non-biodegradable, and they don't really do much for the environment anyways. At least the garbage attracts flies. Why not start with them first?

Re:CO2

[DrXym]

I assume anyone going to bother of doing this would feed the output from the worm farm into a secondary chamber filled with algae or bacteria which would consume the CO2 to produce fuel or something along those lines.

Re:CO2

[donaggie03]

Would you prefer they shit diamonds? Being serious here, but you do know that polystyrene foam is made from refined oil, yes? Once the oil is extracted, you can either A) leave it in a tank. B: make it into something and bury it into the ground. C) Covert it back into CO2 via burning or organic methods.

What would you prefer is done with the existing polystyrene foam out there?

The obvious answer is leave it buried in the ground. Anthropogenic global warming is caused by us taking carbons that have been locked away underground in the form of fossil fuels and releasing them into the atmosphere. If we use those fossil fuels but keep the carbon locked up or re-entered into the ground instead of the atmosphere, we wouldn't have nearly as much trouble with all the greenhouse effects. We'd have another problem in the form of mountains of waste we don't know what to do with, but that's a different discussion.