Beetle larvae that eat polystyrene may help solve plastic waste crisis

By Alice Klein

Matthew Horwood/Getty Pictures

Beetles with larvae that can digest polystyrene could most doubtless well support to resolve the enviornment’s mounting plastic crash crisis. Expanded polystyrene, which is ancient to maintain cups and bins, is an increasing number of clogging up landfill and polluting oceans because it doesn’t biodegrade.

Until just no longer too long within the past, no organisms had been known so as to interrupt down polystyrene. Nonetheless Hyung Joon Cha at Pohang College of science and Expertise in South Korea and his colleagues maintain found that the larvae of a north-east Asian beetle called Plesiophthalmus davidis can perform the job.

When the researchers …