How worms could help solve plastic pollution

[Music] these worms are doing something that we always thought was impossible [Music] they are degrading the non-degradable [Music] digesting the non-digestible they're eating plastic this is how they reduced a piece of styrofoam in just a week if we could harvest their superpower we could get rid of our plastic trash in weeks rather than centuries they could save countless animals help clean the environment and avoid toxic plastic incinerations so [Music] can plastic eating bugs help solve our plastic problem [Music] oh my god they are really warm huh here they are oh yeah yeah yeah yes i i have to say that mine are nicer huh she's federica bertokini a molecular biologist who in 2017 made an important discovery i noticed basically cleaning one of my beehive that there was these worms so basically i cleaned put in plastic bags and usually what i used to find was dead invertebrates but these worms manage to eat their way out of the plastic bag so this this is something interesting to grasp the importance of this discovery we first need to understand what plastic is plastic is a mysterious material she's susan frenkel a science writer author and real plastic guru in the natural world natural substances decompose they're you know sort of broken up by bacteria by bugs they go back to their essential elements carbon water oxygen plastic doesn't do that it just gets smaller and smaller and smaller and smaller but it's still essentially plastic that's why microplastics stain the environment for centuries today we see plastic's resistance to bacteria as a curse but we forget that it's also part of its miracle plastics really transformed the world they really created our modern world a world that is safer more hygienic more colorful than the world that came before [Music] for most of our history we've built things with stuff we found in nature wood rocks and metals but as the world modernized there was a growing demand for properties that only scarce natural elements possessed things like raisin silk or ivory in the mid 19th century people were worrying that so many elephants were being killed for their tusks to make billiard balls that the elephants were being driven into extinction eventually a billiard ball manufacturer promised a rich price to whoever could find a more abundant substitute for ivory that caught the eye of an inventor named john wesley hyatt who spent several years tinkering in his workshed and eventually came up with this stuffed celluloid the plastic age had begun adverts like these celebrated the new material the crystal clear plastic that lets you see everything you wrap now get these lovely washable plastic roses free cups savor a lot of extra glasses to wash [Music] celluloid replaced torto shell coral and mother pearl nylon replaced silk and bacolite replaced the raisin of the la capital it's funny because in the early years plastic was seen as sort of a salvation of nature and today we look at it as one of the chief enemies of the natural world plastic is now everywhere some are light and transparent like plastic bags others are extremely resistant like bulletproof vests what they all have in common is they're polymers which just basically means they're materials that are made up repeating atomic units and i think of them as like beads on a chain what a plastic looks like how it feels how it behaves all of that depends on how the beads are put together and the reason why plastic lasts so long in the environment is that nothing evolved to break down these type of bonds or at least that's what we thought [Music] so i bought these worms oh my goodness they are called mealworms and you can actually buy them online and watch them become a cute beetle as you feed them with styrofoam it's not the organisms themselves that are breaking it down it's the bacteria inside those organisms probably producing enzymes this is dominic ian he's a professor of structural biology and he knows everything about enzymes it's exciting times for enzymes we're actually searching in nature rubbish down all sorts of horrible places actually to find those bacteria out there that are growing on the surface of the plastic and digesting it their goal is to find new bugs and bacteria that can digest plastic isolate their enzymes and then enhance and must produce them in bioreactors [Music] obviously we can't just break the ocean with enzymes so this technology can't help with the plastic already in the environment however it could revolutionize our recycling system to really recycle something you have to break it down to its basic elements so that you can rearrange them into something else but because we can't break down plastic bonds we can only recycle it once or twice before it becomes unusable and that's why these worms can be a game changer if you think about biorecycling what you can do is take that plastic break it down into its components again and reuse it again and again and again infinitely in fact it sounds like sci-fi but it's already underway for example a french company named karbios is already using enzymes to recycle bottles like these and not just once or twice but in theory infinitely if you can increase the value of the waste you incentivize the market to go forward and collect that plastic in the first place instead of people actually paying money to put it in landfill sites people will be paying money to take it back out again and reuse it so the technology works but it's not scalable yet and it's still more expensive than virgin plastics oil and gas is really cheap so that means it's cheaper to make plastic from oil and gas rather than from recycled materials we need to get these technologies working at a much bigger scale than we're currently doing now in order to even make a dent i do believe we can do that but we really need to work hard [Music] so can my worms with their enzymes solve our plastic problem i think it's great if we can find things like you know mealworms that eat styrofoam or you know the bacteria that consumes oil but the problem with plastic is really a design problem it's that we're taking these fossil fuels and we're using them all too often to make things that are trivial and unnecessary and serve you know kind of stupid conveniences we are in a toxic relationship with plastic we invented it to substitute and repel bugs and now we're turning to bugs to get rid of it i don't think we want to live without plastic i mean you know i like the fact that my glasses sit light on my face or that in the middle of the corona virus that there are disposable things people want to demonize plastic the issue isn't the material the issue is how we make it how we use it and how we dispose of it and here as well my square me friends have an important lesson to teach us [Music] they have adapted to live with plastic we should do the same all right my friends here we are go now you're free go and save the world eat all the plastic bye bye thanks for watching and if you like my little friends or if you're just interested in sustainable topics check out our youtube channel and please subscribe we have a new video coming out every friday you

Channel: DW Planet A

Views: 1,103,411

Keywords: DW, Deutsche Welle, Plastic, worms, bugs, bacteria, enzyme, recycling, pollution, decomposition, biotechnology, microplastic

Id: q-X2KkKfW2U

Length: 9min 38sec (578 seconds)

Published: Fri Oct 23 2020