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Foam-Eating Worms May Offer Solution To Mounting Waste

Posted by samzenpus on from the I-for-one-welcome-our-new-foam-eating-overlords dept.

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.

23 of 90 comments (clear)

  1. CO2 by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 5, Insightful

    Good, because if there's one thing we need, it's more atmospheric CO2.

    1. Re:CO2 by evanh · · Score: 2

      That's what I was thinking. Last thing we want is to convert it to more CO2. It's better to leave it in the landfill until global warming is sorted at least.

    2. Re:CO2 by DrXym · · Score: 3, Informative

      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.

    3. Re:CO2 by donaggie03 · · Score: 3, Informative

      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.

      --
      Three days from now?? Thats tomorrow!! ~Peter Griffin
    4. Re:CO2 by idontgno · · Score: 3, Funny

      So, your answer is "it's not landfill waste, it's carbon sequestration."

      Funny. Every silver lining comes in a dark cloud.

      --
      Welcome to the Panopticon. Used to be a prison, now it's your home.
    5. Re:CO2 by myowntrueself · · Score: 2, Interesting

      That's what I was thinking. Last thing we want is to convert it to more CO2. It's better to leave it in the landfill until global warming is sorted at least.

      The planet is turning into a desert from lack of available carbon for plant growth.

      Earth needs more co2 not less.

      --
      In the free world the media isn't government run; the government is media run.
    6. Re:CO2 by ultranova · · Score: 2

      The planet is turning into a desert from lack of available carbon for plant growth.

      My lawn, nearby forests, and algae blooms in the waterways disagree.

      Earth needs more co2 not less.

      "3) Climate change is happening, it may well be due to human activity, but itâ(TM)s generally beneficial"

      Like clockwork.

      --

      Forget magic. Any technology distinguishable from divine power is insufficiently advanced.

    7. Re:CO2 by random+coward · · Score: 2

      YES! Been saying for years that our recycling has been the cause of global warming! Leave all that paper waste in the landfill, its carbon sequestration! Don't recycle it.

  2. Re:burn it by whyloginwhysubscribe · · Score: 3, Informative

    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...

  3. Why? by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 4, Interesting

    polystyrene can be burned cleanly emitting the same amount of CO2 and also be refined through pyrolysis to useful carbohydrate usable as fuel in diesel and gas vehicles.

    The only argument for using meal worms is that the Styrofoam is mixed with household waste or in a land fill where it's too dirty to recover.

    This is a poor band aid for a failed recycle system!

  4. Future Generations Will Thank Us. by bjwest · · Score: 2

    Not to worry, future generations, possibly even some living now, will be mining our landfills for resources.

    --

    --- Keep the choice with the user..
  5. Re:Breed better mealworms by sexconker · · Score: 2

    I call em Graboids.

  6. Question for the chemists by Solandri · · Score: 2

    Polystyrene is mostly air. If you dunk it in a solvent like acetone, it dissolves, releasing the air and decreasing to something like 1% its original volume. Why isn't this considered a viable way to deal with polystyrene trash?

    1. Re:Question for the chemists by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 5, Interesting

      Recycling centers don't like dealing with Napalm B, and your government would prefer you don't have it around also.

    2. Re:Question for the chemists by fuzzyfuzzyfungus · · Score: 2

      I suspect that the problem is dealing with mixed/contaminated waste streams. Outside of the lucky folks doing nuclear remediation, a lot of waste materials aren't actually too unpleasant to deal with if they would have the decency to show up clean and sorted. If you had a bunch of polystyrene foam you could indeed attack it with solvents, melt it, crush it, if you wanted to reduce its volume; or incinerate it according to the correct parameters if you wanted to get rid of it; and it'd probably actually be worth money to somebody, plastics don't get better with each melt cycle but they can definitely be good for a few.

      The trouble is that, unless there is some elegant trick available, or the material is pretty valuable, sorting is a giant pain in the ass. Even if you try to make the end users do it, compliance isn't great and mixing of plastic types is almost inevitable(which is hard to blame people for, given that plenty of products and packages contain multiple plastic types and often aren't coded). That is where biological solutions get much more attractive: mealworms could easily enough survive, probably thrive, on a ground and moistened mixture of styrofoam, bits of food, household paper; etc. and eat around what they can't digest as long as it isn't overtly toxic. Attempting to devise a chemical attack that would work against such a mixture would be less fun.

      Aside from any practical waste-management considerations; this story is pretty cool because, while polystyrene was discovered in the mid 1800s, it wasn't really used in any quantity until the 1930s. That's pretty quick work for the evolution of a new metabolic mechanism to attack a previously nonexistent food source.

  7. That's all good and well. by idbeholda · · Score: 3, Informative

    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?

  8. Re:Frost by VernonNemitz · · Score: 4, Interesting

    It seems to me that someone hasn't paid enough attention to certain science-fictional warnings. I can't be the only one who has read that book!

  9. This reminds me by sergei83 · · Score: 2

    Back when I was a kid in Russia we had a big garbage container outside our kindergarden filled to the brim with worms. We threw in the foam that was lying around near by and watched it disolve. Good times.

  10. By all means by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 3, Insightful

    Please spread polystyrene eating bacteria indiscriminately. Because it's not used as light structural support in anything at all.

  11. The EPA should tighten up the limits by AndyKron · · Score: 3, Funny

    The EPA should tighten up the limits on meal worm CO2 emissions, and force them to put more in their feces.

  12. Rememeber When? by jjhues7676 · · Score: 2

    Back in the early nineties I read an article that someone received a patent for a bacteria that when spread across a garbage dump would eat the garbage and its waste would be methanol. Where is that today?

  13. That CO2 was locked in that plastic by mpercy · · Score: 3, Insightful

    Polystyrene would keep that CO2 sequestered for what, 1000 years or so? And now they've just released more into the atmosphere with the cow farts and Volkswagen emissions!

  14. I think they have this backwards. by jimbob6 · · Score: 2

    Wouldn't it be a much more beneficial project if they found a way to convert CO2 into polystyrene. Creating a parasite that eats houses, boats, marina's and refrigerators in order to dump green house gases into the world seems like a bad idea. Why do we hate plastic so much? If the forest floor is covered with plastic, and the plants are growing around it, so what? Sure plastic has some stuff in it that is mildly toxic but its only released when the plastics break down, which is contrary of the argument of the article which states that it doesn't break down. Granite has been around for billions of years but you don't see any one going all "mad scientist" on the granite epidemic that has for generations plagued rock quarry's. Our prejudice towards plastic is mostly cosmetic.