Waxworm's spit shows promise in puncturing plastic pollution

The caterpillar larvae of the wax moth produce saliva with enzymes capable of oxidizing and degrading polyethylene, offering a potential solution to the plastic pollution challenge. Built from synthetic molecules derived from fossil fuels, plastics have changed the industrial world since the Second World War. However, many …

[ThatOne]

Terms and conditions

> In oceans particularly, plastic pollution endangers wildlife and enters the food chain.

I'm afraid this won't change even if the enzymes work as expected, you can't just pour a couple billion tons of those enzymes into the sea to remove those plastics... Unless washed ashore they're there to stay.

[Neil Barnes]

Re: Terms and conditions

True, but on-land treatment might reduce the incidence and amounts of plastic getting into the sea, which is probably no bad thing.

Though one can see a future conversation: "Well, the good news is we don't have a plastic problem any more. The bad news is, we don't have any more bees..."

(I think Larry Niven had a throwaway line in one of his books in which he notes a new species of bacteria evolved that literally ate the packaging off the shelves and led to a whole new set of storage solutions.)

[John Hawkins]

Re: Terms and conditions

Bees live with these already; we had beehives on the farm I where grew up and we used to find the grubs in old combs we'd stored in the shed. Occasionally we'd see grubs in the beehives, but only in odd corners where the bees weren't.

Wild bees living in hollow tree trunks would likely be a better environment for wax worms as bits of old comb and dead bees etc would likely build up below the colony.

[Anonymous Coward]

Re: Terms and conditions

Depends on the end result. If the degradation is in such a way that the result is a useful material, you might find scavengers going out searching for plastics to reprocess.

OK, that's wishful thinking, but possible.

[Francis Boyle]

Re: Terms and conditions

Not at all. The best way to eliminate a waste product is to turn it into a resource.

[JDX]

Re: Terms and conditions

>>Unless washed ashore they're there to stay.

Not really. There are already projects trialling which capture plastic from the ocean. It tends to congregate in certain areas which can be effectively targeted

This won't get it all and doesn't help with tiny fragments but a lot can be done even if only the easy pickings are taken. And plastic is constantly being washed up so if we can stop more getting into the system, over time things will improve.

Being more speculative, organisms which eat plastic might even be introduced into the oceans but this seems rather unlikely... ecosystem engineering could easily cause more problems.

[Trixr]

Re: Terms and conditions

It's true that attempts at "corrective" engineering of entire biosystems never seem to end well.

One sensible initiative recently is the creation of waste traps where waterways exit to the ocean - I hope these scale up rapidly around the world. It's a lot easier to "harvest" and process the plastic if you're not in the middle of the ocean. The more any such interception takes place "upstream" (in the literal and figurative senses), the better.

As alluded to above, it doesn't mean that we can take our eye off the ball when it comes to restricting the types of plastic products that most readily end up being discarded in the environment. There's also the not-insignificant issue of fossil fuels being used to produce them, although that's slightly better than simply sending them up in smoke.

But at least it'd solve a large part of the problem of disposal, if it works as it promises to, including the ridiculous current situation of literally shipping garbage all over the world.

[Cuddles]

Re: Terms and conditions

"you can't just pour a couple billion tons of those enzymes into the sea to remove those plastics"

I think you mean we probably shouldn't do that. Given sufficient funding, there's nothing making it inherently impossible to do so. I suspect it would take quite a bit more than only a couple of billion tons to have any noticeable effect though.

[b0llchit]

Although further studies will be necessary to obtain a deeper understanding of the step-by-step evolution of plastic...

Call me a cynic, but the result would probably be to produce even more polyethylene as a result of the "good news".

In the future then, a lot will be recycled/digested and the part not recycled will still be discarded and littered equating to the same amount currently being discarded and littered. We can call this a perfect win-win-lose situation. A win for humanity, a win for capitalism and a lose for nature. Just as it always has been.

I told you, I'm a cynic.

[Pascal Monett]

Allow me to hope that there will be a better outcome for this.

[Anonymous Coward]

It's almost a certainly

that is is a re-discovery. I will lay good money that someone somewhere - maybe 50 years ago - noticed this, thought "that's odd" and then went on to do something different.

[Caver_Dave]

Re: It's almost a certainly

"That's odd!" is to route to much of the worlds scientific discoveries.

[Screwed]

Calling Milton Jones

Are very big ones called bee he moths?

[myhandler]

Any fast and bulbous squid involved?

[Zimmer]

Doomwatch

Episode 1, The Plastic Eaters.... February 1970

.. it's what passed for Science Fiction and Environmentalism on the telly, back in the day..

[Ivan Headache]

Re: Doomwatch

Driving in the car yesterday, this story came up in a news bulletin. The lovely Ivana said “I remember reading a book about that, where aeroplanes fell out of the sky”

Can’t remember what the book was called, but it was the base of that Doomwatch episode.

[Francis Boyle]

Re: Doomwatch

Water is the deadly enemy of paper and yet we have libraries on a planet that is covered in the stuff to the extant that it falls out of the sky.

I'm not really worried about rogue worm enzyme dissolving my tupperware.

[Martin Summers]

Ha! Eat that, plastic. The worm has turned!

[spireite]

Presumably, when they discovered this.......

...... they couldn't stop talking about it .....

They waxed lyrical.....

[Anonymous Coward]

The source

Apparently the boffins were studying the wax moth in general and noticed that a scrap of polyethylene bag had stuck to one of the cocoons. Over time they noticed the bag degraded. They fortunately decided to research this fortuitous occurrence.

BTW, the "spit" is what the wax moth larva uses to build its cocoon (actually any larva and cocoon - silk is made of spider spit).

Here's to observant and curious boffins everywhere.