Scientists turn dead flies into biodegradable plastic

But how exactly does it work?

Black soldier flies are already an agricultural commodity, cultivated widely for animal feed because they’re an increasingly popular alternative protein to fish and soy meal.

Because they have good nutritional value from the food scraps they eat, it helps do away with organic waste.

Typically, however, only the larvae are harvested for feed and once the adults mate and breed, farmers discard them – though it’s the hard shells of the mature insects that caught the researchers’ attention.

This is because they contain chitin, a strong, fibrous substance that makes up the exoskeleton armour of the flies.

Using processes involving the application of ethanol, acid, and bleach, the team was able to extract and purify this non-toxic, sugar-based polymer from the bugs to create a powder that they then turned into polycarbonates or polyurethanes, which are usually made from fossil fuel-based chemicals.

‘We’re taking something that’s quite literally garbage and making something useful out of it,’ says Cassidy Tibbetts, a graduate student on Wooley’s team.

‘Ultimately, we’d like the insects to eat the waste plastic as their food source, and then we would harvest them again and collect their components to make new plastics,’ continues Wooley, explaining that because the bioplastics are biodegradable, they are likely ingestible by the flies themselves, giving new flies the nutritional sustenance to become the next plastics.

‘So the insects would not only be the source, but they would also then consume the discarded plastics.’