Hi! Our names are Gwen Blaney and Ericka Mercado. For our science fair project, we are determining whether super worms could be a viable solution to plastic pollution. We are in the Environmental Engineering category!
hello I’m Erica Marcado my name is Gwen blay and we’re from Frederick Maryland USA in our project we studied whether or not superworms would be a viable option for plastic pollution specifically we wanted to investigate the rate at which worms would consume the styrofoam if they would consume the Styrofoam in the presence of their natural bedding SL food and how consumption of the styrofoam affects them in the comparison to the control group we started off with 400 worms divided them into groups of 20 per trial there were four Trials of three different kinds of plastic polyethylene foam polystyrene styrofoam and polyvinyl chloride the control group were the worms that were being Fred Plastics over the course of a month we recorded the masses of the plastic and how much it depleted each day additionally we observed the behaviors of the worms in the trials compared to the control group nearing the end of the experiment we found out that styrene the monomer that makes up polystyrene is a volatile compound voc’s or volatile organic compound pounds are substances that readily evaporate into the air at typical temperatures and pressures this means there would be a mass loss observed from the frass L ex treetment by the end of the experiment we cannot determine the chemical composition of the frass and whether it contained microplastics because that would involve the use of costly Machinery like gas chromatography mass spectrom that we don’t have access to from what we are seeing in the frass there are multiple white specks of Styrofoam that were mechanically broken down by the worm worms potentially indicating that they are breaking it down however this does pose a concern as the worms begin their process of breaking down the plastic they create microplastics all worms in the trials including control appeared to be lethargic at the end of the data collection the worms in control began to cannibalize one another despite having a food source available while the trials with various forms of plastic did not show any signs of extreme stress in fact one of the worms from the trials began that eat PL that was eating plastic began to pupate indicating that it gained some sort of nourishment from the plastic this could be because their natural food sources contain Trace Amounts of styrene when calculating the mass loss from the styrene that evaporated from the fras we found that there was 038 gram of styrene produced which is about 3% of the total amount of Styrofoam that turned into styrene
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