Meet The Plastic-Eating Worms | Planet Fix | BBC Earth Science

these worms are literally eating their way out of this plastic bag but not only can they eat it it's actually good for the planet so if they can biodegrade plastic could they be the answer to our planet's massive plastic problem biology has found a way to some extent to deal with this because the latest science on this is mind-blowing not only might we make plastic biodegradable we might even one day be eating vanilla ice cream from recycled plastic and E coli yes I mean it's chemically identical yeah so we'll get back to that in a

minute let's start with the worms these little creatures are wax worms Dr Federica bear takini is a molecular biologist and she first Witnesses phenomenon when she chucked a bunch of wax worms in a plastic bag as a hobby side project because well who doesn't I bumped into the Works warm accidentally because at that time I was a beekeeper because they they live in the beehives they are considered plagues by beekeepers so after cleaning my beehive putting warms the plastic bag and within a short time I realized they were making producing holes the plastic started to

degrade almost as soon as it touched the worm's mouths so we thought okay maybe something coming after the mouth so Mr Collective is leaving coming out called the saliva but it's the liquid coming out of my mouth so in this saliva we found two enzymes that can reproduce the effect of the saliva meaning oxidizing polyethylene and it takes a few hours at room temperature in a watery solution and the amazing thing is that the worms can even digest the plastic breaking it down into something useful for the worm the worm itself when it eats the

plastic and starts breaking it down its guts react almost as if it was eating normal food so that means that there's something happening with the physiology of the animal that extracts something out of this plastic biodegradation and it just continues as if it were a normal diet that's Dr Chris Lemoine who inspired by federica's findings also began looking into these worms we found that the plastic allowed them to still retain all their fat and presumably continue with their life cycle basically these worms are fattening themselves up by whatever means necessary before they turn into moths

by by which point they don't eat again only reproduce I always call them bags of gonads that can fly because that's all they do so there's a race on the way to figure out just how this mechanism works that's the million or trillion dollar question because once we figure that out that's a trillion dollars worth of plastic we can degrade because as cool as the wax worms are this is really about the specific combination of bacteria and enzymes that can break down plastic something that's exceptionally rare in nature so why is it so rare why

is plastic so hard to break down well in nature most things decompose because bacteria breaks down the chemical bonds that hold a substance together these enzymes and bacteria have evolved over Millennia to break down whatever it finds in front of it then plastic comes along here's a scene that has long since ceased causing any surprise dishes that bounce when they drop to the floor nowadays it gets bad rare but it's a total game changer Humanity but Nature's never experienced it before Plastics are made up of long chains of polymers with very strong bonds and one

of the keys to Breaking these bonds is through oxidation that's what the worms appear to be doing with their saliva introducing oxygen molecules to the plastic and this is something that's achieved in environment through light for timing so the worms what they do is just introduce multiple of oxygen so in a few hours instead of months or years or whatever so this is the the it's a way to overcome the bottleneck of this reaction so what's next unleash the worms uh no that would be a terrible idea remember this they are considered plagues by beekeepers

but even sticking just the plastic the process is still way too slow to realistically solve our plastic crisis anytime soon so Stand Down waxwear marmada the real stars of this though are the enzymes if the researchers can identify them and scale them up there's a chance that in the future this could be one of the solutions it will take a lot of cash this but now scientists are looking for similar enzymes in all sorts of other places super worms do so anything that's a worm in it it seems to be prone to eat uh plastic

in fact over 30 000 enzymes have been identified capable of digesting 10 different types of plastics one bacteria found in cow stomachs can be used to digest polyester but the one that's getting everyone really excited is a bacteria called idianela sacchaeensis and especially its enzyme pettes Plastics waste in general but more specifically pet has infiltrated our environment and biology has found a way to some extent to deal with this over time there is a discovery outside of Japan where they had found that microbes began to colonize on parts of a water bottle the cells were

actually living and maybe even surviving off the carbon within that plastic we can take this enzyme out of the cell and we can begin to engineer that enzyme even further to be able to have better activity directly on plastic waste pet plastic that would take centuries to break down in nature pettes can break down in a matter of days but it doesn't solve our plastic problem not yet anyway to have any real impact at scale we need to Turbo Charge how quickly it works and that's exactly what Hal's team has done and they name this

really fast version of pate's um fast bet days they did this using AI essentially by using a vast database of all known enzymes in the natural world and then running simulations about which combinations and mutations would speed up the process kind of like a form of computerized accelerated Evolution machine learning approach really is its rapid Evolution to some extent on there but at the same time it's Guided by observation we saw that this enzyme was not very stable overall and use the machine learning type of approach to figure out which point mutations would make this

enzyme more stable and found a couple of mutations that really both increase the stability significantly but then also gave rise to a significant increase in the activity in this enzyme on plastic this Cutting Edge technology opens up a whole new frontier of scientific possibility and the team aren't done yet thinking about trying to clean up plastic that's actually in the environment those applications don't have the benefit of being able to control the temperature and pH very well so having an enzyme that ultimately is flexible enough to work in a variety of different conditions is extremely

valuable once pet plastic is broken down into its component parts teraptalic acid and ethylene glycol it can then be recycled into new plastic but it doesn't necessarily have to be plastic in theory it could be used to make something better like this well sort of because a team of scientists in Edinburgh have found a way to turn plastic into vanillin that's the central ingredient in vanilla and they did it using E coli sounds delicious or me and for anyone who's thinking about a nice vanilla ice cream what what are we not understanding about that we

can ask this question a lot um yes I mean it's chemically identical okay forgive me if the next part ruins vanilla for you so vanillin is a compound that's derived from from oil that we pump out of the ground it's the same feedstock that we use to make petrol that we we use in our in our cars so we in essence took one of those enzymes that had been reported to do the initial depolymerization and then took the mixture of pterothalic acids and ethylene glycol that you get from that and simply just fed it to

our E coli but the way that I think about it is you know yes this compounds coming from plastic waste and yes it's coming from a bacteria but I think we as a society are okay with eating food that has oil in it the vanilla and derived from oil so why wouldn't we be okay with having having a bacterium produce produce that for us now these guys aren't really trying to sell you vanilla ice cream they're more interested in upcycling recycled plastic there's recycling Plastics into more Plastics and then there's upcycling Plastics into other compounds

the issues at the moment currently with that approach is that when you subsequently recycle plastic into other Plastics the value of that plastic and the quality of that plastic actually diminishes so you you enter into this down cycling approach that does solve the problem in the short term but It ultimately generates the same waste what we think is quite interesting about upcycling plastic is you re-enter that carbon back into the you know the chemicals economy as something that's higher value vanillion is not the only product that we can make from pet plastic the molecules that

you get when you depolymerize pets and are actually intermediates on route to a huge number of Industrial Products that we rely on nowadays one of the most interesting ones that we're focusing on right now is is pharmaceutical intermediate you can take plastic waste and turn it into pharmaceutical compounds so taking something that's actually damaging the environment and turn it into a source of human medicine so medication other flavoring compounds materials for your clothing Cosmetics it's quite staggering I think this is only really the beginning of what could be possible in the area of plastic subcycling

I think that very much is the case so worms themselves aren't going to eat all our troubles away but the science going on around this is genuinely exciting and it's all thanks to nature for providing the inspiration