Is there an insect that can devour plastic, breaking it down to less harmful components?
I felt a strange urge to buy me some bugs and let them eat my plastic garbage after watching this video 😂
Someone commented that microplastics would still emerge during/after bugs have dealt with plastics.
Do we have any bug existing that could eliminate microplastics as well?
What would be ideal IMO is a bug with a gut bacteria exclusive to that species alone that could eat plastics and digest them fully so microplastics aren't an issue. Likely, a species for each type of problem plastic. A natural analogue would be termites, which can only digest wood because of such a relationship.
It would have to be an artificially engineered relationship, and an insect that's not particularly proliferate. Preferably with a narrow set of habitat tolerances. That way they could be farmed, but be unlikely to get into the environment and become a nuisance by eating plastics we don't want them to.
Black soldier flies are prolific and when proper conditions to reproduce are met, the females do not wander far from the place they are born and because of this are already used in organic waste disposal.
Using a complex organism to treate waste, even if only plastic, requires specialized infrastructure, designed to contain any event possible to pose a threat to the environment; this is not something we want or can do at home. Specialized infrastructure would make possible ideal conditions for the flies.
Black soldier flies also have the advantage that adults do not live for very long, do not feed, do not pose threat to human beings and the larvas die quickly if no food is available.
These flies also are vulnerable to cold and extreme heat conditions.
The problem with plastics is that the modern definition of the word plastic is too vague. Today it basically means any synthetic or semi-synthetic organic polymer. Do you know what fits this definition? Gluten in your bread.
And the problem with news reports is that they don't describe what exact plastic they're talking about.
loads of organisms that can digest gluten already exist. Not so much for polyethylene etc. Also gluten is made of proteins with definite length not polymers
I also just don’t care about plastic pollution that much… at least not compared to carbon emissions. I mean don’t get me wrong, I’d rather we didn’t have crap everywhere… but I’d rather we focused on minimizing carbon, even if the low carbon options happen to involve plastic.