On: Mealworms can compost styrofoam

[singron]

I don't know about industrial processes involving bacteria, but the mealworms might be providing a lot of value. First they chew up the styrofoam, and then they provide an environment (pH, nutrients, enzymes) for the bacteria to be effective. Mealworms are also fairly easy to breed.

If you isolated the bacteria, you might need to provide those other functions in an alternative way that's more cost effective than putting some worms in a bucket.

[Waterluvian → singron]

You don't buy fire, you buy a furnace. The mealworms really are the functional tool here, even if the bacteria is what's doing the work.

[hinkley → Waterluvian]

It’s gonna be quite some time before we can make better bioreactors than nature.

[simonh → hinkley]

Tell that to the brewing and cheese industries.

[andruc → simonh]

Each of which being thousands of years old.

[hinkley → simonh]

Tricks that work for airborne yeasts don't necessarily work for microbes that like digestive tracts.

[samstave → singron]

Would you need to feed the mealworms anything other than just styrofoam? i.e. can you just have a giant vat of mealworms that you through styrofoam into?

[salamanderman → samstave]

My recollection of the original stanford writeup was that you actually couldn't feed the worms anything else. If given any options, they picked styrofoam last.

[abiogenesis → singron]

True, but at industrial volumes it might be more space/cost/time effective to directly use the bacteria, combined with a mechanical or chemical pre-processing step.