Worms to the rescue – using enzymes to tackle plastic waste - video Dailymotion

DW (English)

Biologist Federica Bertocchini discovered that wax worms can perforate plastic. And break it down - thanks to special enzymes.

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00:01Everybody gets fascinated by these animals.

00:04They are extremely resistant to planeting, to lack of oxygen, to cold.

00:11I mean, it's not scientifically proven. These are observations.

00:15But if you keep them at four degrees for many weeks, if you put them out,

00:19they don't die, they just recover again.

00:23For people not working with insects, they're not great.

00:27They're not great. It looks like a fly, you know, this fly larvae, the one that people use to fish.

00:33But then you explain a little bit what it's about, and it's already, you know, smoothing people.

00:39Like, okay, so the stuff is getting interesting.

00:42I think at some point you stop seeing the worm as it is, and you see some potential behind there.

00:50I'm Federica Bertocchini. I'm a biologist, and I'm a co-founder of a start-up called Plastic Entropy,

00:56which is hosted here in France.

01:00And I work on plastic degradation using biological systems, particularly a worm, commonly called worse worm.

01:10They can help us to solve the problem of all this plastic we see around,

01:15try to get rid of that, transform it into something which is not a poison for us, for humans.

01:23I realized that these worms were making holes in the plastic.

01:27Not just making, I can make a hole with the finger, but just transforming it into something different.

01:33I like environment, in fact, and probably to escape from the lab because you spend all your life at the microscope in a lab.

01:40So I developed this hobby, which is beekeeping. I'm a beekeeper as an amateur.

01:47It happens that the beehives are plagued with an animal, which is infected with worm.

01:53And so I was cleaning one of my beehives and putting all these worms that were infested in my beehive in a plastic bag,

01:59and then realized there were holes within 40 minutes, half hour, an hour.

02:04And then I'm curious, and the curiosity is unstoppable. Let's try to investigate that.

02:09We found enzymes which the worm itself produce, which are in the saliva,

02:14and enzymes applied singularly and produced in a lab can actually break down the plastic.

02:21Because this was the, the major achievement is the discovery of the enzymes.

02:25Now we start producing the protein in the lab, that's when you are really, really happy.

02:30When the first discovery came up, I was unemployed.

02:34When I managed to get some money, it took two years to start over again.

02:38So these two years, those two years and a little bit, they were stuffed.

02:41And so, absolutely, we all know what's happening to plastic.

02:44There is no solution that most of the plastics burn or we're accumulated in the environment.

02:51Looking at the numbers, all over the world is 9% recycled.

02:54And when you recycle it, the technology as it is now is not good enough.

02:59You can recycle only a couple of times.

03:03I never advocate for the use of worms, because the worms also, they can chew on plastic.

03:07And in fact, when you look at the faeces, you have some small microplastics,

03:14so you don't want to release millions of worms and then not controlling the situation

03:20because you have to collect the faeces.

03:22You need to have a controlled environment to use that.

03:25And so it's something you really control very well.

03:27I advocate for the enzymes.

03:31The industry wants a solution in six months that could be economically favourable.

03:37And we cannot provide that.

03:39We cannot provide something which can compete with the burning.

03:43It's been tough.

03:44And knowing that in advance, maybe I would have thought twice,

03:48because it's been really a challenge.

03:52Worms, proteins, polymers, degradation.

03:58I didn't know anything of those.

04:01And when I don't know anything, I go to collaborate and I'm not afraid of my mistake.

04:05I make a mistake and sometimes I think, wow, it wasn't a great performance.

04:08It doesn't matter because from the mistakes you learn.

04:10My contact with the RANS started a few years ago because I came here to give a TED talk at Sciences Po in France.

04:18So that was interesting.

04:19We moved here.

04:20We are an incubator here.

04:21So we get some little bit of funding from the environment.

04:27We should all work together.

04:28We really should stick together because there are a handful of these animals and there are more we are finding.

04:35And there is no coordinated field.

04:39We never had a meeting to get all of us together.

04:41That's what we need to do.

04:42Otherwise, everyone on his own won't get anywhere.

Worms to the rescue – using enzymes to tackle plastic waste

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