LOS ANGELES -- Plastic foam eating super worms may sound like something out of a science fiction movie, but for one local surfboard shaper, the worms have been a secret component that's enabled the shop to get closer to the goal of producing zero waste.

Ryan Harris, the shop's owner, grew up in Oregon but fell hard for surf culture when he moved to Los Angeles after college.

He soon discovered the inconvenient truth about surfboard making that if a board weighs 5 lbs, it generates about 5 lbs of plastic foam waste.

After experimenting with bio resin and repurposing old boards, Harris decided he wanted to find a way to create zero trash in his supply chain. About a decade ago, his company Earth Technologies became among the first to take every little piece of waste and categorize, reuse, repurpose, or upcycle it into new products, like coasters and handplanes.

Green innovator Eddy Garcia of Regenerative Education Center was the one who introduced Ryan to the worms.

“In a small space about the size of Ryan’s surfboard factory even, you could take one surfboard and with 50,000 worms which fit in a bin this big you can eat a giant surfboard in about a week," said Garcia. "To break it right back down into powder and the rest of that process with the board takes about six months for all the other little creatures and everything to eat it.”

The worms are in fact beetle larvae. They're able to break down the foam due to a special gut bacteria they possess that enables them to eat plastic foam and turn it back into organic matter.

Both Garcia and Ryan want to emphasize that this is still a pilot project and the first of its kind, and they don’t want the enthusiasm to get ahead of the facts. The worms still excrete some plastic foam bits, so it has to be processed with other creatures to fully break down into potting soil.

They want to scale up, but need help and funding to do so and have launched a GoFundMe to ask for public support in creating the first polystyrene composting facility in the world.