Transcriber: Tullio Tricarico Millefiori Reviewer: David DeRuwe
100 quadrillion mealworms.
This is how many worms we’d need to break down every piece of plastic
on our planet in one year.
That might seem like a lot of insects because it is,
but these bugs reproduce quickly.
If I spent $10 today and bought 1000 mealworms,
I could have over 100 quadrillion worms before 2030.
I’m George Shenusay, a Brooklynite studying environmental science at UCLA
with a love for animals and the movie WALL-E.
If you haven’t seen it, it’s about a robot that cleans up all of Earth’s trash
and it’s kind of my role model.
Just like Wall-E, I have a mission too.
I want to see if there’s a safe and economical way
to turn plastic waste into fresh, healthy food.
I know you’re thinking:
“This is the worst idea I’ve ever heard in my entire life.”
But hear me out.
I think this could actually work.
About two years ago, I was wandering around
in a room used by one of UCLA’s sustainability clubs,
and I noticed a container full of Styrofoam chunks
and mealworms crawling all over them.
When I took a closer look, I couldn’t believe it.
When I found out the insects were eating this plastic,
I needed to learn more.
Since only two other groups were studying and publishing on this topic,
I read through the rest of the limited literature
and began ultimately just taking care of and observing these worms myself.
Now 40 other students, a few faculty mentors, and I
are working with these worms
and researching their ability to eat plastics.
As we observe these worms,
we confirmed that they are able to eat plastics such as Styrofoam,
and they particularly enjoy Styrofoam
because its soft texture makes it easy for them to chew.
This is the same Styrofoam that takes up about 30% of the volume of our landfills,
and left unchecked, this will continue to pollute our environment
and can cause serious health effects for humans.
And landfills are just the tip of the iceberg.
The EPA estimates
that about 9% of plastics have ever been successfully recycled.
On top of that,
an average human eats about a credit card worth of microplastics every week.
So how do we stop this from happening?
Luckily, mealworms are willing and able to eat this plastic for us.
Similar to most animals, mealworms have bacteria in their stomach,
which allow them to digest their food.
Unlike most animals, mealworms have 12 specific bacteria in their stomach
that allow them to break down plastics such as Styrofoam.
This allows one worm to eat about a milligram of polystyrene, or Styrofoam,
every week.
30,000 worms could eat a Styrofoam cup in a day,
and 100 quadrillion worms could eat every piece of plastic on our planet
in one year.
The fact mealworms are able to break down plastic, alone is exciting,
but what if we could simultaneously use this process
to produce fresh, healthy food?
The first question we’d have to ask ourselves would be:
Where’s this plastic going, and would that be safe?
Well, after a mealworm eats Styrofoam,
the plastic can end up in one of three places:
It’s either respirated out as CO2,
incorporated into the worm,
or excreted as waste.
Now, you might be concerned
that some plastic is ending up in the worm,
but don’t worry, this plastic is being safely integrated into the worm as fat.
The challenge comes in figuring out what to do with the mealworms’ waste.
While normal mealworm waste is commercially sold as a fertilizer,
the plastics in our mealworms’ waste need to be processed a little bit more
before we can use it as a fertilizer.
We're looking at purifying this waste with a variety of fungi and bacteria
and hoping this can help us make a safe plastic-to-food pathway.
Imagine if we were able to take plastic waste to a facility
that not only broke it down, but used the byproducts from that process
to produce mealworms, mushrooms, vegetables, and fruits.
Now, with all these crazy ideas floating around,
it’s hard to think of one concise answer to the problem at hand.
We’ve thought on it a bit,
and we’ve come up with the idea of an urban aquaponics greenhouse
that uses plastic to power the growth of its plants.
Aquaponics is a soilless gardening technique
that uses the waste from fish to nitrify water to grow plants.
Incorporating mealworms into this system
could help us funnel many of these byproducts from plastic breakdown
into the growth of plants.
For example, the mealworms themselves could be used as a fish food
while the waste could be used to nitrify the water,
and the CO2 that the worms emit
could even be used to promote the growth of plants.
We’re hoping to take these natural processes
and take a step towards sustainable agriculture
and safe plastic composting.
While a plastic-powered aquaponics greenhouse
is an exciting concept in and of itself,
there are so many other ways to use plastic-eating bacteria.
While mealworms can’t swim,
we think we can use them to help clean up the plastic in our oceans.
What if we gave the same marine life that was suffering from microplastic pollution
the tools they needed to clean it up?
In the same way that humans put their gut bacteria into mice
to test different ways to improve our gut health,
we could take the gut bacteria from mealworms
and put them into fish and whales.
As these animals swim through the ocean,
they could filter and clean out the water for themselves.
Another idea we’re particularly excited about
is a plastic-degrading bioreactor,
which uses the same bacteria as we find in the mealworm’s stomach
to degrade plastics like Styrofoam into bioavailable nutrients for plants.
While there’s a lot more work to be done
before a safe plastic-to-food pathway is possible,
each one of us has the power to change the world today.
I know you might not have time to build
an aquaponics greenhouse powered by plastic
or splice mealworm DNA into your goldfish or build a bioreactor -
I get it -
but there’s more plastic on this planet than ever before.
We need to inspire a fundamental shift
in the way we think about our plastic waste.
Minimizing my personal waste has been a rewarding and creative process.
I’ve saved money and simultaneously driven my roommates crazy
by washing, freezing, and reusing all of our tin foil in Ziploc bags,
but we need to keep in mind that recycling is not the burden of an individual.
We need to hold large plastic polluters accountable for their actions
and dissolve this idea that recycling is our individual responsibility.
But I think we can all learn a thing or two from WALL-E
Instead of looking at plastic waste as a nuisance that we should deal with,
we can look at it as an opportunity to build something amazing.
As a species, we’ve traveled to the moon, sequenced our own genome,
and even invented guacamole.
but all this means nothing
if packing peanuts are what’s going to drive us to extinction.
Together, we can do this.
Let's take a more natural approach to plastic waste management,
and let’s make it to 100 quadrillion mealworms.