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STORY: British designer William Eliot says his latest project is a bio-collaboration.

"What this effectively is, is an inter-species design project where I'm collaborating with the mealworms to design furniture."

Together, they’re creating this...

A three-legged stool called 'Digested Objects.'

Each design begins with Eliot collecting waste polystyrene, which he says takes up about 30% of the volume of landfills globally.

"What is fascinating about the mealworm is that they have a bacteria in their stomach called Exiguobacterium, and that allows them to break down this manmade molecule, artificial, chemically made property, and turn it into something organic and they're able to sustain themselves. They can effectively live off polystyrene.”

The gnarled, pitted, three-legged stool is 3D-printed in black sand with weird, organic elements.

It’s a record of the path the mealworms take as they consume the polystyrene.

“I'll inject sugar into the polystyrene. And so the mealworms are sort of guided by the polystyrene, it’s almost a scaffold. And they'll eat that high-calorie substance first, and then they're once they've eaten all that, free to do their own thing.”

After the mealworms are finished eating the resulting ‘design’ is cast in wax.

It is then 3D-scanned and digitally upscaled to determine the most viable design.

Eliot says the furniture could change how people see the insects.

“They're often seen as quite disgusting things, but if they're creating the furniture that you're sitting on and you like the way that it looks, maybe we need to re-evaluate our perceptions around these things."