MealCycling Stages

It all begins with single-use plastics. Sometimes plastic is unavoidable in our culture as it exists today, and many areas do not have systems in place to reuse and/or recycle the waste. We currently collect these plastics from our local community, but hope to expand in the future.

As a stopgap solution for the plastic crisis, we will repurpose single-use plastics into items that can be reused many times. In the future, we wish to reach a production level where we could accept these items back for MealCycling.

All unusable plastics from the repurposing phase are fed to darkling beetle larvae (mealworms) for consumption and biodegradation. Learn more about the science behind this process here.

The final mealworm stage is called a darkling beetle. After they have laid eggs (typically 500 per female) and have lived their full life (30-90 days), their exoskeletons can be harvested for chitin. This chitin is then pressed into a biodegradable alternative to plastic.

Mealworm droppings are called frass. This byproduct is highly beneficial to compost, and can be used in place of commercially available mineral fertilizers.