Can wonder organisms such as ‘superworms’ really solve our plastic waste crisis?

We’re in deep trouble with plastics but we’ve got to fix the problem ourselves, says Harry Cockburn

Our planet is drowning in plastic. Call in the worms (Getty)

One word. Are you listening? Plastics... There’s a great future in plastics,” Dustin Hoffman’s character is told by his parents’ friend in the 1967 film The Graduate, as he considers his post-university future.

In the mid-to-late 20th century, the seductive malleability of plastics became a key aspect of the American Dream and helped to facilitate the crescendo of capitalism that has led to hyper-consumption in the western world.

But the “great future” plastics once had has unravelled. The limitless creative possibilities plastics provide has rapidly resulted in a limitless global surfeit of waste plastic, which is now clogging almost every conceivable ecosystem on our planet.

From the seabeds of the world’s deepest marine trenches to the highest mountaintops, a calamitous confetti of plastic has been showered across the globe.

Microplastics are now found even in the fresh snows that fall on remote parts of Antarctica, and various kinds of plastics are found in animals throughout the foodchain, including humans, where it has recently been detected for the first time in our blood. Plastics will be detectable in the fossil record, scientists say.

What are we going to do about it?

Well, there’s the 5p plastic bag levy in shops, which has been going for seven years in the UK. But if you go into any supermarket, the gleaming translucence of single-use plastic packaging is everywhere.

We’re addicted to plastic, and we don’t know how to stop.

Around the world, a million plastic bottles are bought each and every minute. Five trillion plastic bags still go into circulation every year.

What’s worse is that half of all plastic produced is designed to be used just once and then chucked away.

And where is away? Our plastic is either dumped into places where it washes into watercourses, ultimately leading to the oceans, or it is deposited in huge concentrations that leach plastic particles and chemicals into the natural environment.

While more eco-friendly options have become available, such as plastic-like packaging made from biodegradable potato starch, or from cornstarch, or mushrooms or seaweed, their production requires us to take up even more farmland to produce – which, if done on the scale required to fully replace plastic, would also lead to major environmental damage.

But we’re not even at that stage. According to the United Nations Environment Programme, we now produce about 400 million tonnes of plastic waste every year.

Since plastics were invented, we have created 7 billion tonnes of plastic waste so far. Of this, less than 10 per cent has been recycled.

So while it is heartening to see that scientists in Australia have confirmed that “superworms” can digest polystyrene, it is doubtful they can present a meaningful reduction in plastic waste hitting the natural world.

In 2016, Japanese scientists announced that bacteria they had cultivated were able to digest plastic bottles. How much of an impact has this breakthrough discovery made?

In the best-case scenario, bacteria or superworms might help future generations recycle their waste; in the worst case, they could prompt carelessness among manufacturers today who believe a miracle solution is at hand.

But humanity needs to end plastic pollution entirely, as soon as possible, and not put too much stock in superworm-style solutions.