Meet Ananya Nagendra, 18, who built an ant-based digester for food waste

Food waste is usually thought of as a problem that begins in the kitchen and ends in a garbage bin. But once that waste reaches a landfill, it can create another environmental problem: methane. Ananya Gulur Nagendra, an 18-year-old student from Plano, Texas, wondered whether one of nature’s smallest scavengers could help tackle some of that waste. For her Regeneron Science Talent Search project, she studied how ants could break down food waste and developed a prototype of an ant-based aerobic digester. Her experiments compared four ant species to determine which could consume the most waste. She found that Camponotus castaneus performed particularly well and used those findings to design her system. Tests of the prototype found it was about 83% efficient.