For a while, I hated shopping at the kosher grocery store in Kemp Mill.  Because you had to pay for each bag that you needed to take your groceries home.

Oh, sure, I know that is supposedly to stop us from dumping our bags in the Chesapeake Bay.  But, I recycled mine properly- so if they ended up in the Potomac River or the Chesapeake Bay, it was because Alexandria fell down on the job.  (Don’t get me started that we just found out that Alexandria has been dumping untreated storm water (and the associated debris from the streets) into the Potomac River forever!  Like it didn’t know there was a law against that.)

Honestly,  putting our plastic into a dump is a dumb idea.  Because, as far as we know, that waste is going to be around when the Mashiach (the Messiah) comes, given plastic’s virtually non-existent rate of decomposition.

Until now.

Because serendipity shines when the viewer is well-armed with knowledge.  Just like Dr. Donald Stokey “discovered” Pyrex, the way I “discovered” liquid bicarbonate dialysate, and   Drs. Rhee and Min determined that Salmonella infections may “cure” cancer, Dr. Frederica Bertocchini may have found the answer to our plastic bag disposal problem.   (This ain’t chicken feed folks- we (just in the USA) use some 102 billion plastic bags- a year!)

Bertocchini was trying to get rid of a bunch of wax worms (actually, the larvae of the moth Galleria mellonella, a caterpillar).  It seems these pests attacked her beehives.  Which meant that her honey was being eaten.

She collected the offending beasts into a plastic bag to dispose of them.  Except, she discovered the plastic bag holding these critters replete with holes and the wax worms swarming all around free.

Knowing she was out of her element (no, not the beehives, but Bertocchini specializes in embryonic development), she contacted some pals at the University of Cambridge to help.  Drs. Paolo Bombelli and Christopher Howe were ready, willing- and curious to discern the phenomenon.

Come on folks- these are academics!   So, you shouldn’t be surprised that they reported their results in Current Biology.  What did they tell us?  These caterpillars aren’t just breaking up the plastic bags into pieces, but they are employing polyethylene (the common plastic used in bags, also known as PE) in their growth.  QUICKLY!

Now, I’ve developed strains of microbes that degrade all sorts of recalcitrant organic molecules.  But, the rates of degradation were on the order of micrograms of material degraded per hour.  These worms chowed down on 92 milligrams of the plastic in just 12 hours.  (You do remember that there are 1000 micrograms in a milligram, right?)

The researchers also proved that this was intestinal degradation and not just wax worms chewing the bags.  How did they demonstrate this?  The researchers crushed the caterpillars into a paste and spread that mess over plastic.  In just 14 hours, about 1/8 [13%] of the polyethylene was gone.

How did this process develop?  We’re not sure, but the wax in beehives employs the same sort of chemical bond as that found in PE.   Oh, and we’re not sure it’s really the caterpillars doing this.

Because just like humans have a plethora of microbes in our gut, so do the caterpillars.  And, this could be one (or many) of the microbes that populate their gut effecting the action.

That’s the next phases of the research.  Find the active component.   Amplify its capabilities.

Then, it’ll be up to some ChemE’s to scale up the process and solve our plastic problem.