Bug eat plastic bags: clearing white pollution has new hope

Wax is a common insect larvae of large wax borer. Wild wax moth parasitic in the colony, the whole of the European honeycomb is a scourge. Wax moths lay eggs in the hive, and their larvae rely on beeswax hatching and growing - wax moths and hence the name.

Bertocchini came from the Colombian Institute of Biomedical and Biotechnology (CSIC) in Cantabria, Spain, and co-author Paolo Bombilli, and Christopher Howe of the Department of Biochemistry at Cambridge University. They brought about a hundred waxes into contact with a plastic bag in a supermarket in the UK, and only 40 minutes after the bag began to appear on the bag, and 12 hours after the weight of the plastic bag than the beginning to reduce the 92 mg.

The study was published on April 24 at Current Biology. Paolo Bombelli, Cambridge University's first author, Cambridge University, said: "If only one enzyme in this chemical process works, then the use of biotechnology to replicate the process should be feasible, the recycling through polyethylene densifier may become an important tool, which can help us clean up the landfill and the accumulation of polyethylene plastic waste in the ocean.

Polyethylene is widely used in packaging, accounting for 40% of the total demand for plastic products in Europe, of which 38% will be discarded to the landfill. People around the world consume about one trillion tons of plastic bags a year. In general, plastic is extremely difficult to break down, even smaller debris is difficult to be degraded by the ecosystem. So it caused serious environmental damage. While nature may be able to provide a solution. Beeswax is a mixture of a wide variety of lipids, and lipids are key molecules that make up the biological cells of fat, fat and certain hormones.