A group of Yale University students participating in the annual Rainforest Expedition and Laboratory have discovered a species of fungi that snack on plastic.
The fungi, Pestalotiopsis microspora, is the first anyone has found to survive on a steady diet of polyurethane alone and--even more surprising--do this in an anaerobic (oxygen-free) environment that is close to the condition at the bottom of a landfill.
When I read the article I found myself feeling sorry for the fungi and wanted to feed them something more nutritious and better tasting; maybe they'd like a glass of warm milk with that. I think there's something wrong with me.
Link via frequent contributor Bruce.
First question that springs to mind is "Just how much polyurethene is there in the rainforest, anyway?"
ReplyDeleteThis reminds me of a television drama series of the early seventies, which had at its centre a team of scientists whose job it was to forsee unwanted consequences in scientific developments...
The first episode was a story about how the "Doomwatch" team came into being, after a well-meaning research initiative to develop a strain of bacteria that could be used to tackle the ever increasing amount of problematic, non-decaying plastic in the world. A critter that could be let loose in landfill sites, for instance, or in the floating masses of plastics that clog our seas. All very well, it seems, nobel prizes all-round... Until, on an airliner somewhere over the atlantic, the overhead locker drawers start to droop, melt, and drip. Then the controls...
Oh yes. Our friendly microbe is tired of garbage, it's mutated to eat any plastics, anywhere. And it spreads like a plague. And our world is now held together by plastics.
Watch out for those fungi.
Good premise.
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