Humanity would be able to fight with millions of tons of excess plastic with the help of large wax moth. They can effectively decompose polyethylene, which represents 40 per cent of plastics.
Mankind produces annually 300 million tons of plastic, says Scientific American. Almost half of this ends up in landfills, 12 million tons in the ocean. For now, we have not yet found a sustainable way, how to get rid of all these quantities, but this could be changed.
Researchers from the UK and Spain have in fact found that the larvae of the large wax moth can effectively biodegrade beeswax and polyethylene. "The wax is a complex mixture of molecules, however the basic bond, carbon-carbon, is present in both the polyethylene and the wax, and the larvae of the wax moth has over time succeeded in developing a mechanism in order to disintegrate it" explained the co-author of the study Federica BERTOCCHINI.
On the results is impressed an American microbiologist Jennifer Debruyne, who did not take part in the study, but she was surprised seeing the speed with which the larvae degraded polyethylene. Now, by her words, the next step would be to carefully determine whether the enzyme that breaks down polyethiylene is produced by larva itself ot it is the microbes in its digestive tract. Bertocchini agrees and hopes that the findings will help the world in a fight against the plastic.