We know that the mealworm eats polystyrene since a Californian couple kept their worms in a styrofoam box. Studies have since shown that worm and plastic form a perfect symbiosis in which the worm extracts all the necessary nutrients from the foamed plastic and transforms it into a biologically usable mass. The same worm is also a high-quality source of protein and already regularly ends up on the plates of a third of the world‘s population. But what else arises in its life cycle when the larvae grow, pupate, become beetles and eventually die? Plasticula is dedicated to these remnants, which consist mainly of chitin, and shows how they can be transformed into new materials. The background is the transformation of an inherently harmful plastic, which is transferred into new sustainable cycles and simultaneously dissolved.
