“Our team is very excited to push the science to make it happen,” he said.

Rinke said there are many opportunities for the biodegradation of plastic waste. “We can then look into how we can upscale this process to a level required for an entire recycling plant,” Sun said. Co-author of the research, Jiarui Sun, said they aim to grow the gut bacteria in the lab and further test its ability to degrade polystyrene. It’s hoped this bio-upcycling will incentivise plastic waste recycling and reduce landfill.

“The breakdown products from this reaction can then be used by other microbes to create high-value compounds such as bioplastics”. “Superworms are like mini recycling plants, shredding the polystyrene with their mouths and then feeding it to the bacteria in their gut”, Rinke said. The long-term goal is to engineer enzymes to degrade plastic waste in recycling plants through mechanical shredding, followed by enzymatic biodegradation. The researchers used a technique called metagenomics to find several encoded enzymes with the ability to degrade polystyrene and styrene. “This suggests the worms can derive energy from the polystyrene, most likely with the help of their gut microbes”. “We found the superworms fed a diet of just polystyrene not only survived, but even had marginal weight gains”, Rinke said.

Chris Rinke and his team from UQ’s School of Chemistry and Molecular Biosciences fed superworms different diets over a three-week period, with some given polystyrene foam, some bran and others put on a fasting diet. Researchers at the University of Queensland (Brisbane, Australia) have discovered the common Zophobas morio ‘superworm’ can eat through polystyrene, thanks to a bacterial enzyme in their gut.

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