The Jury of the Junior Academy of Sciences was amazed when Kateryna Malkina, a 9th grade student of Mariupol Technical Lyceum, presented her discovery for the first time. She had discovered that living organisms – darkling beetle larvae – could digest polyethylene, a form of plastic that usually takes hundreds of years to decompose. That same school year, Kateryna participated in the International Environment & Sustainability Project Olympiad (INESPO) in the Netherlands, and won a silver medal for her project. While in the 10th grade, Malkina presented her research at the International Sustainable World Energy, Engineering and Environment Project competition in the United States, and also came second. Finally, she won a gold medal at the MOSTRATEC International Science and Technology Fair, annually held in Brazil. Based on the results of Intel Eco Ukraine 2018 contest, Kateryna, now a senior, won the chance to represent Ukraine at the GENIUS Olympiad, an international high school environmental project event, in the United States. The young Ukrainian feels that every year her method of bio-recycling of polyethylene is being taken more and more seriously.

“I’m 17 and I just want to solve problems. Not to brag about it, but simply make them go away.

My parents have always told me that my older cousin participated in competitions and contests and that I should follow her example. I got so annoyed with it that I said I’d also do some scientific research!

I went to my teacher and told him what I wanted to do. And he said: ‘You need to decide what it will be about.’ Well, I decided, and I came to him again and said that I didn’t like plastic being scattered all around, the wind carrying them, and plastic bags hanging on the trees. He said: “I recently found an article that said that food moth larvae ate polyethylene.” You know, sometimes, when you open a kitchen cabinet where you keep your grain-based products and see plastic bags with holes. I’m sure you’ve seen that.

I remember reading all sorts of studies and research about this until four in the morning.

To conduct my own research, we took three different containers – one with bacterial flora, one with live darkling beetle (Zophobasmorio) larvae and the third one with mould. And so, through trial and error, we got our first results on the third day.

Everybody else had already completed their projects for the city’s Junior Academy of Sciences contest, and I still only had a theory. And so me, my teacher and the guard were sitting at the lyceum at 10 pm. I was exhausted, and thought: ‘Well, that’s it, I’ll check the containers one last time just in case, and go home.’ I opened one of them and couldn’t believe my eyes. So I asked my teacher: ‘Vyacheslav Vadymovych, is this how it should be?’ The other containers had squares of three types of polyethylene, while this one had a plastic bag that had been eaten through!

The last time we checked, there were 108 organisms being studied in the world – fruit moths, mealworms, various fungi, bacteria and others – capable of digesting plastic. Our darkling beetle had never been mentioned anywhere. So we immediately seized on this idea.

Scientists and attendees at MOSTRATEC Junior, held as part of the MOSTRATEC International Science and Technology Fair in Brazil, were quite surprised that these beetles had been studied in Ukraine, as they originated from South America and in Ukraine they’re bred as food for reptiles. Their larvae are high in protein content, and quite inexpensive.

Our data shows that 100 larvae can digest 1.7 g of polyethylene a day. That is slightly more than a small disposable plastic bag. That’s very fast!

We developed an installation worth US $90 and designed to process 100 kg of polyethylene. It consists of a container with a specific environment inside, bark for example, where darkling beetles lay eggs, and 1,000-2,000 larvae. A small sensor shows temperature, humidity and time. This is the simplest model, but it works. At the end of the process, we get water, carbon dioxide and other substances that are much easier to recycle than polyethylene.

The problem now is that, unfortunately, we don’t have a patent. In order to obtain it, we need to conduct a rather lengthy laboratory analysis. There’s also no interested party. The learning institutions I’ve called responded very vaguely: ‘We will help when you become our student.’

If I manage to obtain a patent for this discovery, my research could become a part of my term paper. In any case, I’d like to work on similar projects in the field of natural sciences.

I want to discover everything about everything. My success depends on my self-discipline: Self-discipline is the thing to work on.

I love my land and I want my country to develop and achieve harmony. Despite difficult situation in the country, many young people I know bring awards, from bronze to gold, from international science fairs in the field of astronomy, physics, mathematics, ecology every year. We do not believe we should fall into decay. We’re offering our own solutions to problems.”