Plastic-loving grubs could eat up our rubbish

• Autores: Lefteris Apostolakis
• Localización: New scientist, ISSN 0262-4079, Nº. 3123, 2017, pág. 8
• Idioma: inglés
• Texto completo no disponible (Saber más ...)
• Resumen

  • Caterpillars might hold the key to the growing problem of plastic waste. While removing caterpillars from beehives, researchers in Spain have chanced upon one type that seems to have a taste for the stuff. The team found that a hundred caterpillars of the Galleria mellonella moth can riddle a bag with holes in under an hour, or consume 92 milligrams of plastic in half a day--just over 3 percent of a supermarket shopping bag. That's fast considering it takes at least 100 years for a bag to decompose naturally, says team member Federica Bertocchinl at the Institute of Biomedicine and Biotechnology of Cantabria.