Foam-eating microbes the missing link in surf environmentalism…
File it under kind-of-interesting-and-tangentially-related-to-surfing, researchers at Beihang University in Beijing have found that meal worms will eat polystyrene, microbes within their guts converting the foam in carbon dioxide.
Good news for those of us who enjoy sliding waves on hunks of poison. Sure, the people who sold you that EPS import will insist it’s recyclable, but I don’t see anyone rounding up old boards and ripping the glass off of them. That’s shit’s really just a marketing ploy, whatever you’re riding now is destined to languish in a landfill.
So it’d be pretty neat if we could just toss our broken or unloved boards in a pile and let bugs eat them.
But don’t get too excited, like every other cool science story you’ve ever read online, this one is only telling you part of the truth. Yeah, the bugs will eat a bit, but not enough to really make a difference.
“Ramani Narayan, an expert in plastic biodegradation at Michigan State University, says the researchers have made an interesting discovery, but that it is not yet ready for practical application. He notes that about half of the polystyrene the mealworms eat is excreted back into the environment in fragments that may not be biodegradable and could carry toxins up the food chain.”
Pretty sure there are no mealworms eating up that polyol seeping into the hay creek ranch soil.