Wriggling critters armed with enzymes can break down plastics that would otherwise take decades, or even centuries to degrade.

At first

glance

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there's nothing particularly remarkable about waxworms. The larval form of wax moths, these pale wriggling grubs feed on the wax that bees use to make their honeycomb. For beekeepers, the pests are something to swiftly get rid of without a second thought. But in 2017 molecular biologist Federica

Bertocchini

, who at the time was researching the embryonic development of vertebrates at the Spanish National Research Council, stumbled on a potentially game-changing discovery about these creatures.

Bertocchini

, an amateur beekeeper, threw some of the waxworms in a

plastic

bag after cleaning her hive

,

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and left them alone. A short time later, she noticed the

worms

had started producing small holes in the

plastic

, which

begun

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began

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degrading as soon as it touched the

worms

' mouths. "It was a real eureka moment – it was brilliant,"

Bertocchini

says about the initial discovery and the realisation of what it meant. "It was the beginning of the story. The beginning of the research project, of everything." The

worms

were doing something that we as humans find remarkably difficult to do: break down

plastic

. (Read about the human effort to break

plastic

down through "chemical recycling".) Not only that, but the

worms

appeared to be digesting the

plastic

as though it was food.

Bertocchini

is now chief technology officer at bioresearch startup Plasticentropy France, working with a team to study the viability of scaling up these enzymes for widespread use in degrading

plastic

. "The big-picture goal is to be able to apply these enzymes to the

plastic

waste," says

Bertocchini

. "I really want

this

discovery and technology to be developed and transformed into a solution that we could use globally."