Plastics are great for packaging. They help keep food fresh, they can moulded as per wishes and they are also quite durable. In fact, so durable that they do not get decomposed by the actions of any microorganisms. 

                           

Unlike most other things that when left in the ground vanish away to dust, plastic doesn't. Bacteria and other forms of microorganisms cannot digest it and thus it says in the system. 

This is a growing global since decades now and people are paying attention to it. However, there still hasn't been any fully effective method developed to counter this waste that doesn't go away. 

Humans produce more than 300 million metric tons of plastic every year. Almost half of that winds up in landfills, and up to 12 million metric tons pollute the oceans. This is the reason almost every beach in the world gets flooded not just with water but with the plastic that water carries with it to the shores. 

                       

While there are startups and companies emerging in the global scene that are working admirably to collect this plastic not just from land but oceans and and recycle it to make something useful, simple recycling won't do. 

The production rate of plastic will always be higher than the rate at which plastics are recycled. For a majority of that plastic will anyway not make it to the recycling centres. 

So what's the solution? 

Interestingly the solution to the problem that affects life is being found within life itself. 

Last year, a Japanese team identified a previously unknown bacterium that can degrade PET.  And in 2014, Chinese scientists suggested that two species of bacteria from the guts of Indian mealmoths, a type of waxworm, can degrade polyethylene (PE)— the world's most common kind of plastic. 

                

The researchers incubated the two strains on PE films. After 28 days they found signs of degradation which included a 50 percent reduction in tensile strength and 30 percent reduced ability to repel water droplets.

While the effects  showed up after almost a month, it was still considerably  effective as plastic naturally takes more than a decade to start showing faint signs of decay. 

The latest plastic eaters

In a latest breakthrough has come to world light thanks to Federica Bertocchini, an amateur beekeeper who is also a biologist at Cantabria University, in Spain.

        

The eureka moment came after she observed some worms infecting her beehive. So she cleaned up her hive, and collected all the bees in a plastic bag. After reaching home when she saw the bag, she realized that there were tiny holes in it and the worms had escaped. 

Though she doesn’t specialize in insects, bee wax or plastics, her scientific mind couldn't contain the curiosity and she started to wonder if these worms could actually digest plastic? 

      

In order to check this, she battered the worms and applied their paste onto the plastic. After half a day, around 13 percent of the plastic had disappeared! This was a rate much faster than the previous bacterial studies so she decided to team up with biochemists Paolo Bombelli and Christopher Howe at the University of Cambridge. 

They analyzed chemical composition of the plastic as it reacts to the waxworm paste and found that some of the substance is converted into ethylene glycol—a sign that it was genuinely being degraded.

Questions remain

Though releasing thousands of worms in the ground to eat up the mess that we created sounds like a tempting thought, there are still questions that remain unanswered. 

While the worms have shown the ability to eat plastic, what remains to be seen is- are they really digesting it or releasing it through fecal matter? Other important question that needs more research is- Are they getting any nutritional value out of plastics? 

After all, we don't want a whole bunch of plastic shit in the land nor are we gonna spoon feed worms with food so they grow while also consuming plastic. Would they prefer eating plastic when given better nutritional food is another story. 

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