Polyethylene makes up 30 percent of all synthetic plastic production, making it a large contributor to plastic waste pollution worldwide, according to the study. These plastic particles have been found everywhere, from Antarctica to rain and tap water, which do not only cause obvious environmental issues but are a growing problem for human health.” “It eventually breaks down into small particles, therefore becoming the source of micro and nano plastic particles. “Plastics stay in the environment for a long time,” Bertocchini tells Reuters’ Will Dunham. This introduces new solutions to the world’s plastic pollution problem through “bio-recycling,” in which organisms break down waste materials and create new products from them.īecause plastic is made to be durable, it’s notorious for remaining intact, polluting ecosystems, seafood, water and even humans’ bloodstreams. To the best of the researchers’ knowledge, these are the first known animal enzymes with the ability to degrade plastic, per the paper. Their enzymes, or proteins that speed chemical reactions, allowed the insects to chemically break down the polyethylene. So that was the beginning of the story.”īuilding on that realization, the new study pins down what researchers didn’t understand before: how exactly the insects accomplish this feat. “After a while, I noticed lots of holes, and we found it wasn’t only chewing-it was. “My beehives were plagued with wax worms, so I started cleaning them, putting the worms in a plastic bag,” Bertocchini, a molecular biologist at the Center for Biological Research in Spain, tells The Guardian’s Damian Carrington.

The initial discovery came about as an accident in 2017, when Federica Bertocchini, a study author and amateur beekeeper, was tending to her hives. Wax worms, or moth larvae that live in the honeycombs of beehives, have two enzymes in their saliva that break down the plastic at room temperature within just a few hours, according to the study. In a study published Tuesday in the journal Nature Communications, researchers discovered that enzymes in the saliva of wax worms can readily degrade polyethylene, a common form of plastic used in bags and other packaging materials. Plastic pollution may have met its unlikely match: the saliva of wax worms.

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