Down to the Wire

Abstract

“Junior, eat your obsolete computer! Don’t you know that an AppleTM a day keeps the doctor away?” Late last year, I stumbled across a paper by Zhu et al. (2022) and was immediately intrigued by the title—“Feeding Preference of Insect Larvae to Waste Electrical and Electronic Equipment Plastics.” I suppose that, knowing the astonishing ability of insects in general to chew their way through just about anything, I shouldn’t have been surprised that electrical and electronic devices aren’t exempt. Their ability to chew their way out of plastic containers, for example, has been known for about seven decades [and experienced first-hand about a decade ago, when we initially tried to set up a colony of navel orangeworms, Amyelois transitella (Walker), in plastic buckets]. Their ability to digest and thrive on plastic as food, though, is a relatively recent finding, reported initially in Chinese (Miao and Zhang 2010) and four years later in English (Yang et al. 2014). Today, more than a dozen species are known to survive on a diet of plastic (Pivato et al. 2022), the vast majority of which are stored product pests (a pattern consistent with the fact that they are among the insects most likely to encounter plastic, given that the stored products they consume are often stored in plastic containers). But the concept that there are insects that can ingest waste electrical and electronic equipment (yes, there’s an acronym: WEEE), or e-waste, was new to me. It was a challenge to imagine what, over the vast span of insect evolution, might have preadapted insects to consume any of the parts of discarded microwave ovens, cell phones, tablets, computers, keyboards, printers, small servers, fax machines, scanners, televisions, cable boxes, video game consoles, and other once-useful tools fallen victim to hardware upgrades.