With Just 12 Per Cent Of Plastic Waste Recycled in The UK Each Year, Superbugs Are Shedding Light On Degradable Plastics

More recently, 100,000 households in the UK took part in a 'Big Plastic Count' survey to find out how many pieces of Plastic they threw away in a week in May. The results were "jaw-dropping", with recycling falling far behind the pace of discarding. But a tiny bug offers a silver lining to the plastic crisis.

The "Plastics Big Count" project is a joint effort between ngo Greenpeace and Everyday Plastic, according to The European Times. The average household throws away 66 pieces of plastic a week, according to the survey. That puts the number of plastic items thrown away in the UK at nearly 100 billion a year. The survey also found that more than half of all plastic thrown away is soft plastic, which is harder to recycle. Cross-reference their findings with figures from plastic recycling agency Recoup, the report calculates that only 12% of the UK's plastic waste ends up recycled.

"The amount of plastic we waste is staggering," says Chris, plastics campaigner at Greenpeace UK. "We pretend we can recycle our way out of the problem, but recycling is just greenwashing ourselves. We make 100 billion waste plastics a year, and compared to that, recycling is almost negligible."

"Recycling doesn't work, we all know that," says Daily Plastics founder Webb. "What we need to do is to reduce plastic production at the source, which in turn reduces plastic waste."

If plastics cannot be reduced at source any time soon, what can be done?

The answer may lie at the University of Queensland. The university's research team discovered a superworm, Gassee reported Sunday. The bugs can not only eat styrofoam, but also digest and metabolize it, providing a glimmer of hope in solving the environmental problem of plastic degradation.

The insects, called Zophobas morio, feed on decaying wood, leaves and animal carcasses, but scientists have discovered that they eat plastic by producing enzymes that break it down, the University of Queensland team said. That got the scientists excited: "Imagine how much 'plastic feed' could be 'destroyed' every day in a giant farm with millions of worms."

The team is now working on this particular enzyme, which they hope could one day be used to break down plastic on a wider scale, without relying on insect farms.