This Awesome Worm Eats The Scourge Of The Earth: Plastic Bags. Seriously!

Will it be waxworms to the rescue in the war against
those awful plastic grocery bags?

The latest thing on environmentalists' hit list is all those plastic bags you take home from the grocery store or wherever.

They don't break down easily. They get caught in the wind and hang themselves up in trees and wires and such and look horrible. They waste space in landfills.

A lot of local and some state goverments have either banned or are considering banning these bags. It's the lateset environmental movement du jour.

Even if we stopped providing all those plastic bags tomorrow, what about the zillions of them that already exist? What do we do with them?

One answer: Wax worms.

Bear with me on this one.

According to Atlas Obscura, scientists have tried to get bacteria and fungus to break down these plastics, and they can, but the process is painfully slow. So slow that it's not worth the effort.

However, was worms are awesome. Says Atlas Obscura: 

"Frederica Bertocchini, a biologist at the Institute of Biomedicine and Biotechnology in Spain, noticed wax works had managed to eat their way through the plastic bags they were kept in. While other organisms can take weeks or months to break down even the smallest amount of plastic, the wax worm can get through more - in a far shorter period of time. 

The researchers let 100 wax worms chow down on a plastic grocery bag, and after just 12 hours, they'd eaten about 4 percent of the bag, according to findings publishes Monday in the journal Current Biology. 

That may not sound like much, but that's a vast improvement over fungi, which weren't able to break down a noticeable amount of polyetheylene after six months."

The theory is that if you get a HUGE crowd of wax worms working together, they can make real progress in the plastic bag wars.

By the way, the worms aren't just good chewers. They break down the plastic into ethylene glycol, which you can use to make polyester or antifreeze.

Great. Maybe the wax worms an also produce ways to keep your car running when it's 30 below, or create tacky 1970s-style fashion.

Awesome!

Florida's "Treasure Coast" Is A Disgusting Goop Of Toxic Algae

The gross algae bloom in Florida. Photo
by Terry Spencer/AP 

Nobody's going in the water and everybody's pointing fingers of blame in Florida for something truly disgusting:

A soupy, icky, possibly toxic algae bloom is gumming up the shoreline at the peak and heat of summer.

As if alligators and unrelenting humidity weren't enough, now you can't go in the water.

Or even near it.

Florida Gov. Rick Scott has declared a state of emergency because of the blue in southeast parts of the state.

And everybody's pointing fingers at each other in blame for the ickiness.

The algae is there because of polluted, phosphorus-laden water coming from Lake Okeechobee, about 35 miles away from the affected areas.

The governor says it's the federal government's fault for neglecting repairs to the lake's old dike system.

He could have a point, since the Army Corps of Engineers is inadequately funded for this type of thing. Plus, there was tons of rain in Florida this past winter and spring, so with their inadequate system, they had to release more tainted water from the lake than usual.

But lots of state officials have looked the other way as farming and other interests have dumped pollution and phosphorus in the Lake Okeechobee. Had they cracked down on that, this not have been such an issue.

As local public radio station WQCS noted, there was a deal in the works back in 2011 for the Florida Legislature to buy more land around Lake Okeechobee for water storage, but Governor Scott's administration came in and put an end to that idea.

So yeah, this might be Scott's fault, too.

Area residents say the algae smells so bad that they  have to stay indoors, and when they do go outside, some of them get watery eyes and respiratory problems.

Plus, wildlife is suffering, too, and some marine animals are probably dying because of the algae.

This kind of thing happens elsewhere due to poor pollution controls, mostly from agricultural, sewage treatment plant and industrial runoff.

There was a big algae bloom on Lake Erie last summer, which threatened Toledo, Ohio's drinking water supply.

Here where I live in Vermont, toxic and thick algae have lately made appearances in and around St. Albans Bay, which I  can see from my hillsice home, in the past few summers. That has caused swimming bans and warnings to keep children and pets away from the algae-slimed water.  It could hurt or kill them.

Of course, it's expensive to enact pollution controls that would prevent all this phosphorus and other bad stuff from getting into waters around Florida, the Great Lakes, Vermont and elsewhere.

But do we really want to spend our summers holding our noses and worried about our health because of all this algae in the water?

Heres an aerial view of the algae in Florida to give you an idea of the scope of the Algae From Hell



And he's a sad video of a manatee trapped in the algae goop and a family trying to hose it off to give it some relief. It's unclear if the manatee made it out of the algae and survived or not:

Australian River Bursts Into Flames

A river ablaze in Australia due to methane seeps. Some blame
nearby fracking operations, while others say this
is naturally occuring.  

I thought rivers that caught fire were a legacy of intense 1960s and 1970s pollution. Remember the Cuyahoga River in Ohio burning way back in the late 1960s.

It turns out, a river was just set on fire in Australia.

Last month, an Australian MP named Jeremy Buckingham went up the Condamine River in Queensland, came up to a area where methane was bubbling up, and set the river ablaze.

The video is at the bottom of this post.

Buckingham, a member of the Green Party, blamed the seeping methane and the fact he was able to set the river on fire on fracking nearby.

CBC News reports Buckingham said a nearby coal gas seam, or CGS, operation is to blame. In the video, he says, "This area has been drilled with thousands of CSG wells and fracked. This river for kilimeters is bubblilng with gas and now it's on fire."

Buckingham and the Green Party are trying to ban fracking in Australia.

CBC says there have been reports of methane seeps in the Condamine River since 2012

A scientific analysis firm said there could be a number of reasons for the methane bubbling. It could be the fracking or other similar activities, or it could be caused by drought and the recharging of acqufers after floods.

Coals is near the earth's surface in the area, so it's easy for gases to rise to the surface from the coal seams.

For its part the local coal and fracking companies say that they are not to blame, that naturally occuring gas seeps occur and can be lit on fire, but they pose no threat to the public.

In any event, burning rivers are probably not a good thing.

Here's the video: