Can Mealworms Save The World?
When is the last time that you have seen a mealworm? Science project? In your garden? Maybe feeding your pet bearded dragon? Well it looks like the mealworm has become so much cooler. Professor Jun Yang and Yu Yang of Beihang University and Stanford University engineer Wei-Min Wu have found that mealworms are able to eat and digest syrofoam and expel the plastic as carbon dioxide and biodegradable waste pellets.
This discovery can prove to do wonders to the environment. Styrofoam, which is a plastic that is used to make disposable plates, cups, and to-go boxes as well as numerous amounts of other products, is a non-biodegradable product that takes thousands of years to degrade into the earth. This means they take up alot of space in landfills and will eventually fill them in our lifetime without degrading.
How does it work?
The mealworms have a multitude of micro-organisms in their stomachs that can break down styrofoam and transfer it into food for the mealworm. Here is a GeoBeats News video explaning the process:
What does this mean for us? Well we could always just gather up all of the styrofoam that is going into landfills, throw it in a giant container with a gargantuous amount of mealworms, and let the nature take care of its self (artificially, of course). But here's the problem: Mealworms are not just worms, they are larvae of the Mealworm Beetle. So if we just load them up in our friendly neighborhood landfill, in about a year's time, you are going to be dealing with about a million Beetles that have grown from the mealworms, which do not eat the styrofoam.
This could pose itself as an ecological disaster; introducing a large number of a single species into a certain ecosystem can harm it in catastrophic proportions and ruin the biodiversity. The new species can overtake the natural flow of the ecosytem and become a dangerous invasive species, such as the Cane Toad invasion of Australia.
The Cane Toad was introduced as a predator to the Cane Beetle and its larvae in Northeastern Australia. Once introduced, the population of the Cane Toads exponentially grew because they had no natural predators in their Australian ecosystem. Their population grew and grew, and are now a dangerous invasive species that carry diseases that destroy their ecosystems that they are introduced to.
Now if we introduce the Mealworm Beetle into landfills, their ecological impact will most likely not be as big as the Cane Toads, but it could have some detrimental effects if they turn loose into a nearby farm or ecosystem.
So if they could pose as a threat, why is this big news?
This is big news because we have discovered that it is the micro-organisms that cause the breakdown of the styrofoam, not the mealworms themselves. If we are able to isolate the micro-organism that breaks down the styrofoam, we can introduce it into landfills to break down styrofoams and possibly other plastics. This use of the micro-organism could also be used on large sites that have been polluted that cannot be gathered and brought to a landfill, such as the Great Pacific Garbage Patch.
Are there any alternatives to styrofoam?
there are quite a few better alternatives to the styrofoam cup that are either recycleable or biodegradable.
These biodegradable cups could replace our conventional styrofoam cups used in restauraunts and fast food locations all over the globe. Even with the mealworm being able to break down styrofoam, why not just cut the pollution at it's source? This would logistically be a much easier and cheaper alternative, for we would cut our styrofoam use exponentially, leaving the hard working mealworms to chomp away at the styrofoam products that we have already used instead of just adding trash to the already overloaded pile. These cups are available at www.ecoproducts.com, as well as a wide variety of environmentally friendly food service products, such as to-go containers and untensils.
How can I get involved?
The best way to get involved is to use what us 21st century folk do best: utilize social media to call out the companies that still use styrofoam as their receptacle of choice. One of the largest fast food companies in the world, McDonalds, still uses styrofoam and non-biodegradable plastic cups to disperse their array of sodas and coffees. Tweet them (@McDonalds) using the hashtag #CutOutStyrofoam and send them a message regarding their use of non-biodegradable cups.
Dunkin' Donuts, a large coffee/breakfast chain, also uses styrofoam to dish out their caffinated beverages. tweet at them too (@DunkinDonuts) and tell them how you really feel about their pollutive, plastic-using ways.
In regards to the hardworking mealworms:
Now the mealworm discovery is a huge step in the right direction environmental-wise, but why not just cut out styrofoam entirely? That way we dont have to take the mealworms out of their usual life of eating your dehydrated food that's been in your pantry way too long. Now that we have discovered the true potential of mealworms, they might step up to be America's favorite insect (step aside, caterpillars).
