Sam Judd: Worms - going down the garden to eat plastic?

Common mealworms eating polystyrene. Photo / Yu Yang, Standford Woods Institute for the Environment

Some time ago, I stated in one of my articles said that, if you don't count polystyrene, my most hated products were single-use coffee pods.

Now it is time to count the polystyrene. The National Research Council has styrene - one of the building blocks of polystyrene (and, scarily, many other plastic products), on their list of known and probable carcinogens. In the United States, over 2.5 billion polystyrene cups are consumed each year. If this is leaching carcinogenic chemicals into all of those peoples' bodies, can you just imagine the health and social costs of the harm it is causing?

I despair every time I drive past an industrial area that produces polystyrene (or uses a lot of it for packaging) as the dusting of snow-like plastic filth infiltrates the road, gutters and pours into the drain.

It is near-on impossible to pick the stuff up once it smashes apart and it is quite literally chocking ecosystems, as well as most likely causing cancer according to the science.

I will never forget needing a cool box to send some crays and fresh fish I had caught to my father in law on an overnight courier. Knowing that he never throws anything away I reluctantly bought a 'poly box', thinking that he would use it again. When I opened it, the stench of new plastic that entered my nostrils had me dry-reaching in the middle of Wellington City. I was convinced that my body's reaction to this smell was telling me to stay away from a chemical that was doing me harm. I just couldn't bring myself to buy it.

So what can we do about this accused product? It is very difficult to recycle, which is no sort of solution to its widespread misuse anyway - more just an excuse for producers to make more of it.

Several cities in California - where consumer protection laws are historically always years ahead of New Zealand - have banned the product outright.

Some clever guys over there are upcycling it into surfboards, which I will admit to supporting, because it is not single-use and not coming into contact with food and thus potentially jeopardising human health.

But even if we did curb the environmental assault caused by polystyrene tomorrow through bans and find a way to divert that which is not too contaminated from landfill by upcycling, what about the horrific amounts that are already out there polluting the environment?

Once again, enter the genius scientists. A collaboration between Stanford University and Beihang University in China have made a remarkable discovery. Common mealworms (a larvae from a beetle), can actually consume polystyrene. It appears that wriggling little battlers somehow remain healthy through this ordeal and excrete something that can probably be used safely as soil for crops.

These findings "have opened a new door to solve the global plastic pollution problem," says Wei-Min Wu a senior research engineer in the Department of Civil and Environmental Engineering at Stanford who co-authored two landmark studies on this phenomenon.

I for one, sure hope that this turns out to be one of the breakthroughs that we need to solve this conundrum, but will science fix our problems fast enough?

What could we do in New Zealand to address the polystyrene challenge?