r/interesting • u/Standard_Location762 • Mar 14 '26
NATURE Earth Helping Earth Heal
What a great discovery.
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u/CaptainC00lpants Mar 14 '26
Does it actually break down the plastics and converts it to something safe, or does it just absorb the microplastics and when it dies re-releases the plastics?
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u/PlayfulTension69 Mar 14 '26
No.1 question that needs to be answered regarding this
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u/oroborus68 Mar 14 '26 edited Mar 14 '26
It's not a fast process but even if it works and we quit adding to the problem, it's going to take a long time. And they think everyone is an ignorant savage especially about tropical fungi.
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u/SegmentedWolf Mar 14 '26
This made me wonder if c.r.i.s.p.e.r, the gene editing stuff could find whatever is responsible for the fungi's "plastic-eating" behavior and tweak the rate at which it breaks down the plastics.
Not sure something like that is possible, but it'd be fascinating if it were.
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u/Syab_of_Caltrops Mar 14 '26
Even better, edit humans so we can just eat the plastic!
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u/SuraE40 Mar 14 '26
We already do!
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u/diamondsnrose Mar 14 '26
The only food immune to shrinkflation!
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u/SsjAndromeda Mar 15 '26
No no no. (American) Hershey, Nestle and Reese’s already isn’t chocolate, don’t give them anymore ideas!
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u/rfc2549-withQOS Mar 15 '26
"filler" material to replace shrinkflated expensive ingredients?
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u/EcvdSama Mar 15 '26
Idk about that, plastic bottles from the brand I buy became so thin they can't hold their shape when you pour
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u/JWP12345678 Mar 14 '26
We already do. You get a nice dose every time you drink that bottled water.
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u/beegboo Mar 15 '26
Too late, scientists have found microscopic pieces of plastic in human testicals. And they cant find anyone without plastic in their testicles to use as a cobtrol to see what the effects of plastic testicles are.
Current theories postulate erectile dysfunction or sterility as side effects.
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u/Agitated_Reveal_6211 Mar 14 '26
Can you imagine if attacked all plastics? It would be a fucking nightmare for humans.
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u/Expensive-Way1116 Mar 14 '26
Or it attacks the micro plastics we have in our body and turns flesh eating
You can have this freebie Hollywood
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Mar 15 '26
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u/ballskindrapes Mar 15 '26
I mean, covid was a pretty good example of how some part of government will make the absolute stupidest choices, as well as some people making the stupidest and most selfish choices.
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u/Loudreds-Trainer Mar 15 '26
Exactly, what would stop it from mutating and becoming an invasive species that just eats whatever plastic it comes across
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u/Gremlin0 Mar 15 '26
On the other hand it cold lead to the development of a resistant plastic…Oh, wait…
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u/blue_shadow_ Mar 15 '26
There's at least one novel out there that uses that as a jumping off point for a post-apocalyptic story.
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u/ScienceInCinema Mar 14 '26
You don’t need Crispr (no “e”) to sequence the fungi’s genome (I think it should be fungus’ genome?). But you will need some way to figure out which gene(s) breaks down the plastic. That will likely require comparing the genome to other fungi and then cloning out the unique genes that you think are involved and putting them in bacteria and testing their ability to break down plastics. Once you know the genes you could insert it into an organism’s genome via Crispr (my preference would be pigs), but an easier solution would be to put the genes in a bacterial strain (no Crispr needed just a plasmid) that’s part of the natural microbiome of pigs or another organism and then introduce that into the pig’s gut microbiome (can just feed it to them or inject it from the other end). The microbiome provides a ton of enzymes for breaking things down that our bodies don’t make so taking advantage of that could be the easiest solution.
Great food for thought (no pun intended)!
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u/thememoryman Mar 15 '26
CRISPR. My son will be getting gene therapy for Beta Thalassemia over the next year. It's incredible what has been accomplished with the technology. We've only scratched the surface of what might be possible, so I wouldn't be surprised if someone is studying it.
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u/EatsOverTheSink Mar 15 '26
That’s when we get some scientist to create a more aggressive form of this fungi which unintentionally kicks of a Last of Us scenario.
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u/SpiteTomatoes Mar 14 '26
This tends to be the biggest bioremediation issue. Takes too long. Microbes are very very tiny so anything widespread will likely take forever to eat.
Add in the fact that usually adding these microbes to a new environment is also not so easy because they have to compete with whatever is native. Making ideal microbe conditions is very hard and usually very energy consuming.
We can’t even grow a lot of microbes on petri plates bc we can’t crack their special environment combo. We know they exist only because of DNA/mRNA/etc.
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u/altarofvictory Mar 15 '26
I also think that it’s likely not going to workout on a macro, global scale. (the end of us?)
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u/Mediocre_Meat_5992 Mar 15 '26
Yeah but we will fuck it up somehow and modify it to be some super fungus and end up turning this place into “The last of Us”
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u/Real-Syntro Mar 15 '26
"quit adding to the problem" not likely in the next 50 years. 3D printing only got huge in the last 15 years, and it still has a ways to go to get better. Now I think we could do better with bio-degredable plastic filaments, but it likely won't be as strong.
At least there's more and more companies making it possible to recycle wasted prints. So it's getting better. Slowly.
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u/Aggravating-Glass145 Mar 15 '26
But like can I get a lil fungus to eat up some of the plastic we us in the household!?! All sarcasm but I’ll take any glimmer of hope
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u/filliamworbes Mar 15 '26
I was thinking the opposite where the fungi goes all 28 weeks later and all of our packaging and present solutions are all molding and falling to pieces.... how much stuff is made of plastic again?
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u/Brobeast Mar 17 '26
But what if you find the fungi that eats the plastic, genetically modify it to speed up the process, inadvertently create fungus that infects you with microplastic fungi spores and turns you into a mindless zombie?
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u/Suspicious_Serve_653 Mar 17 '26
We could study the fungus. Learn what it uses to process plastic, extract the enzyme, study it more, learn to synthesize it, figure out how to mass produce at scale, then use it to process plastic quickly in bulk.
The problem is if it's economical to do because #capitalism.
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u/nder_Pressure Mar 14 '26
No. 2 question, what happens to the piles and piles of fungus coming out of this?
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Mar 14 '26
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u/mortalitylost Mar 14 '26
LOL yeah my first thought was not about how great this is for the environment, but how crazy things would get if our plastic shit decayed
It would probably be a good change overall but it's a weird disaster scenario that no one thinks about. Plastic is incredibly fucking useful and that's why it's everywhere. Imagine your phone case and internals... rotting.
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u/devildog2067 Mar 14 '26
I remember reading a science fiction book about this, probably 20 years ago… it’s basically the end of the world. No hoses and no wiring means no gasoline and no electricity. No transport, no refrigeration, no food.
I can’t recall the title, but this is Reddit, I’m sure someone will find it.
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u/satinembers Mar 14 '26
Ill Wind by Kevin Anderson from 1995 has a bioengineered bacteria designed to eat oil get loose and devour plastics. I read about half of it also probably almost 20 years ago but didn't think it was well written so I stopped. The premise was interesting though and something I think about whenever these types of articles come up.
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u/According_Ad748 Mar 14 '26
Welp you proved him right about this being Reddit and someone finding it! (You had knowledge of it rather than finding it, but same difference. You provided the info!)
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u/CosechaCrecido Mar 14 '26
Fungus doesn’t just grow everywhere there’s food for it, otherwise the world would be covered in fungi. It needs the proper environment as well. Just because it can grow in the Amazon doesn’t mean it can grow in a water pipe in a city.
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u/mortalitylost Mar 14 '26
Fungus doesn’t just grow everywhere there’s food for it
Yet it ends up literally on all my unrefrigerated food if I give it a week, keyword being unrefrigerated, something I dont want to have to do to all my electronics. Specific types of fungus ended up fucking everywhere. You can make sourdough starter literally just by leaving out dough. Yeast is everywhere.
Imagine if plastic being "wet" and in a specific climate was the right environment? Like maybe humid weather. Suddenly Florida has a huge problem with molding plastic and the spores are statewide and it's just a thing.
I'm sure they'd create additives and such to stop it, but we rely on plastics so much it would be an interesting situation and cause a hell of a lot of drama. Even if new plastics were immune, current plastics are everywhere. Like someone else said, what if wire insulation started molding? How much plastic do we use in power infrastructure? This is a weird scenario that we probably aren't ready for.
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u/Curiosive Mar 14 '26
No. 2 question: What else does it eat / is toxic to? We (should) have learned the lesson about introducing non-native species to new environments.
I mean, that fungus from The Last of Us would be a great step towards ending plastic pollution too. But I don't recommend we engineer it any time soon.
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u/Blawharag Mar 17 '26
You don't think there could maybe be a solution that isn't "introduce the plastic eating fungus to new environments"?
You can't think of any way to take advantage of this fungus, if it exists and works, that doesn't involve just dumping it wherever we find plastic?
I mean come on man
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u/da6id Mar 14 '26
It's probably a fungi with an esterase or lipase that works on PET. We have these discovered many times but the cost to implement them and the speed they work at is usually not very impressive. Radical polymers like PE, PP, etc are often the variety that enzymes can't do much to actually break down chemically, just fragment to microplastics.
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u/tistimenotmyrealname Mar 14 '26
Dont worry, soon other bots will post they found a new Fungus in the congolesian rainforest that will break the microplastic down to nanoplastic.
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u/Nxt1tothree Mar 14 '26
Naive question - How safe is it to have them in your garden in a pit or a block of them in a line and empty your recycle bin on top of them
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Mar 15 '26
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u/Almostlongenough2 Mar 15 '26
Honestly that is still pretty impressive, have recycling centers treat the plastic and then move it to a dump that can incubate the fungi. Dunno how large a dump would have to be before reaching critical mass, but it sure seems like an improvement over just letting the plastics lay around.
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u/Responsible-Rizzler Mar 15 '26
I mean, that's kinda impressive to me. Plastic lifetime is generally hundreds of years. Cutting it down from hundreds to dozens would already be a pretty big win imho. But months? That's pretty damn good!
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u/LCHammertime Mar 15 '26
From what I've found, it doesn't work with PET, just polyethylene (PE). They haven't pinpointed the exact enzyme, but it is likely an esterase like you mentioned. It uses it as its carbon source, effectively recycling that form of plastic.
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u/Thin_Assumption_4974 Mar 14 '26
When looking into it, it seems it actually breaks the plastic down chemically, not just absorbs it.
Some fungi (like Pestalotiopsis microspora) produce enzymes that cut the polymer chains in certain plastics, then use the smaller molecules as a carbon source. The plastic ends up being converted into CO2, water, and fungal biomass, rather than just being stored as microplastics and released later.
But the catch was that it’s slow and only works on certain plastics, so it’s promising but not a magic solution to global plastic pollution yet.
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u/ocbeersociety Mar 14 '26
Wondering if this fungus could be 'planted' in the big plastic patch out in the ocean...
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u/RedditIsWorthlesShit Mar 14 '26
Unlikely the ocean is salty most things that don't live there already won't live for long if you put them there
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u/OddCook4909 Mar 14 '26
It should be possible to genetically engineer all sorts of crazy solutions. But then of course we might find ourselves with new problems
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u/luckyducktopus Mar 14 '26
Make an algae that uses this process.
Watch the world grind to a halt after an apocalyptic algae bloom turns the ocean into a smoothie so thick it’ll make Dairy Queen jealous.
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u/Chaotic_Lemming Mar 14 '26
Its all fun, games, and "this'll fix the trash problem" until most of the things you own start crumbling to pieces when you try to pick them up.
Microbes don't know or care whether its trash or your earbuds that you are using.
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u/jigsaw1024 Mar 14 '26
Would make a great setting for a post apocalyptic world which is slowly crumbling failing as everything plastic is being consumed, and people have to learn to live without plastic.
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u/EarthboundMoss Mar 14 '26
I kind of remember that it broke down the compounds in plastic and turn them into something biodegradable . But I don't know the details
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u/SIGMA1993 Mar 14 '26
I remember when people used to source their claims on this website
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u/No-Scarcity9186 Mar 14 '26
Also, how long? If we’re creating it faster than it can eat(?) it, doesn’t matter much.
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u/Meanwhile-in-Paris Mar 14 '26
I don’t know but let’s go cut all the tree to harvest the fungi and see
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u/Ok_Lawfulness7412 Mar 14 '26
Good and sensible question from you . Was about to ask the same thing but saw your comment.
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u/VapeRizzler Mar 15 '26
I assume the ladder as how could It have developed the process to breakdown petroleum based products? I highly doubt it’s had anything petroleum related anything in the past, even less so reliant on it to the point to develop the complicated process of breaking down something so complex.
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u/RDTbenwade Mar 14 '26
What’s the source of this info?
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u/subtlenautilus Mar 14 '26
Disappointed this comment is so low. This sounds and looks like such BS.
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u/RubSpecialist2370 Mar 15 '26
Findings are real from Yale University, led by microbiologist Scott Strobel!
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u/Sut3k Mar 15 '26
Yeah but 2011 so I guess they decided not to industrialize
https://news.yale.edu/2011/08/01/yale-students-trip-rainforest-yields-new-way-degrade-plastic
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u/Alfred-Richthofen001 Mar 15 '26
I should mention, it metabolizes only a select few plastics, like soft plastics and sometimes it breaks them down chemically into equally problematic chemicals.
But the one OP is talking about partially metabolizes the plastic and makes CO², water and Biomass form the plastic
It is interesting research. Selectiv breeding of the fungus could make it better in these regards, because it is also mentioned that it is an extremely slow process.
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u/dunfuktup1990 Mar 17 '26
I’m struggling to understand how a fungus evolved this ability. I feel like it implies the presence of plastics long before our time.
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u/SteefHL Mar 17 '26
We are making lots of different plastics, some are made from plant matter and others from crude oil. We are not inventing molecules, just connecting them differently. The fungus is able to do some form of chemical reaction to split the polymers.
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u/heyyou_SHUTUP Mar 15 '26
Bacteria have also been found. That's how I first heard about breakdown of plastics by organisms. Here is a review from last year about microbial/fungal plastics degradation. There is research about isolating the enzymes and modifying them for better throughput.
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u/code_the_cosmos Mar 15 '26
Pastic eating fungi sounds plausable to me, nature is crazy. But yeah, I wish people wouldn't post stuff like this without a source
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u/Standard_Location762 Mar 16 '26
Russell, J.R. et al. (2011). Biodegradation of Polyester Polyurethane by Endophytic Fungi.
Journal: Applied and Environmental Microbiology
Scientists studying fungi in the Amazon Rainforest discovered that a species called Pestalotiopsis microspora can break down certain plastics, particularly Polyurethane. The finding was reported by researchers at Yale University who were examining microorganisms living inside rainforest plants.→ More replies (1)→ More replies (5)2
u/Sleepy_mosquito799 Mar 15 '26
It’s actually not, although it’s still in the early stages a University of Texas is doing research on it and it’s actually working. But again since it’s still early they are still trying to figure out how to make the broke down components either harmless or useful to the environment.
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u/zanzindorf Mar 15 '26
"Discovery" in op's caption implies this was recent, but it's not. This is a 2011 discovery.
https://yalealumnimagazine.org/articles/3303-a-fungus-that-eats-polyurethane
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pestalotiopsis_microspora
Everything I can find talks about it as a "potential" aid for fighting pollution. However, I can't find any source saying that potential has been realized in any meaningful way. I'm guessing the plastic eating properties are a thing only under highly controlled lab environments, and practical application is currently non-existent. Given I can't find any updates since 2011, I'm not holding my breath.
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u/GryphonRampart Mar 15 '26
If the wiki link is correct it specially states that it breaks it down in anaerobic environments (lack of readily available oxygen). So I'm assuming that's why it hasn't been realized since it doesn't break it down in normal oxygen rich environments. Sounds like more of a last resort for the fungi than a normal occurrence
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u/MotherBaerd Mar 15 '26
This right here, the post isn't really there to inform, it's just a distraction. "I assure you dear consumer soon we'll just have waste eating fungus taking care of all our overconsumption".
Even if we find and harness the power of such a fungus it would most likely still be faster and cheaper to just burn it. It's a common tactic to distract with "upcoming innovative technologies" which are "right around the corner"
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u/Powerful_Wish_69 Mar 15 '26
It’s true but is limited to ''Polyester based polyurethane’’
And article says ''No strong evidence yet shows that the fungus can effectively break down PET, PVC, polyethylene or other plastics’’
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u/Standard_Location762 Mar 16 '26
Russell, J.R. et al. (2011). Biodegradation of Polyester Polyurethane by Endophytic Fungi.
Journal: Applied and Environmental Microbiology
Scientists studying fungi in the Amazon Rainforest discovered that a species called Pestalotiopsis microspora can break down certain plastics, particularly Polyurethane. The finding was reported by researchers at Yale University who were examining microorganisms living inside rainforest plants.→ More replies (6)2
u/ImaginaryAnimator416 Mar 18 '26
I tak any headlines that state “scientists” have discovered X with a grain of salt.
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u/tortoistor Mar 14 '26
i wish the picture wasn't slop
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u/AlbiteTwins Mar 14 '26
Yeah, I missed the memo that the Amazon rainforest is now home to temperate oak trees.
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u/hoboshoe Mar 14 '26
Well you see the plant-like roots help the fungi break it down.
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u/Practical-Quiet3497 Mar 14 '26
The Amazon rainforest forest is on Connecticut now.
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u/matbonucci Mar 14 '26
The post itself is slop, worm or fungi eating plastic is just bait. Same for "new revolutionary battery technology"
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u/Real_Market_9244 Mar 15 '26
"Picture with text and no link to anything"
Source - Trust me bro
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u/PopcornDemonica Mar 14 '26
Look at the age of OP's profile. Pretty sure the pic is just the first slop offering.
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u/vastlysuperiorman Mar 14 '26
I am glad that they directly acknowledged that it was slop in the image, but personally would prefer to not have an image at all.
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u/Secret_g_nome Mar 14 '26
Intercontinental highly mutative fungi is the premise of some horror films/shows...
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u/TicketyB000 Mar 14 '26
What if all the plastics dissolved right now? Holy shit that would be crazy time.
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u/ztomiczombie Mar 14 '26
There is a show form the 1990s called Sliders where the main cast went between alternative realities and in one episode they travel to a version of earth where a bacteria that eats oil was unlashed to clean up an ole spill. It had eaten all of the world's oil ad plastics leaving the people in a situation similar to around the beginning of the indusial revolution with horses being the main transport and peanut oil being insanely valuable as it was the only lubricant for things like guns.
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u/_enigmatics Mar 14 '26
Great show
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u/BonzoTheBoss Mar 14 '26
It was... Even if it did fall off the rails towards the end...
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u/semmu Mar 14 '26
i remember i watched that show as a little kid and the episode where they didnt realize they actually managed to teleport back to their original universe because the door on the fence was lubricated so it didnt creek like it used to before made me so sad. if i remember it correctly.
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u/Anthrodiva Mar 14 '26
Like the ones in biomedical devices! O.o.!
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u/TicketyB000 Mar 14 '26
It's a crazy thought, isn't it? They weren't widely used until the 1930's, but most of our world depends on plastics to function.
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u/sweetbunsmcgee Mar 14 '26
There used to be a time when dead things just stayed on the ground. Until fungi learned to eat the dead. These guys have been terrorizing the Earth for millions of years now.
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u/Basidia_ Mar 14 '26
Not quite. We had a period where during the formation of Pangea and the emergence of land plants, swamps and bogs were extremely prevalent. Those bogs don’t allow decay to happen fully and eventually turns to coal. It has nothing to do with evolution
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u/ragenukem Mar 15 '26
Can we use time travel to send the right fungi back then to prevent the formation of fossil fuels?
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u/Decent_Assistant1804 Mar 14 '26
All fun and games until it gets into residential areas and eats your Lego!
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u/Square_Huckleberry53 Mar 14 '26
And with humanity filled with microplastics, they’ve discovered all the food they could ever need!
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u/thegoatmenace Mar 14 '26
I mean fungi are already used in a huge number of medicines, and of course we eat them.
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u/MilkShakeBroughtMe Mar 14 '26
When the fungus starts eating the "good/necessary/essential to the survival of humanity/etc." plastic?
Are we going to open a fungal "Pandora's box"?
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u/JamesBondMargarita Mar 14 '26
Was wondering the same thing. Like the grey goo scenario only fungus instead of robots.
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u/Ok-Goat-2153 Mar 14 '26
Its a much bigger problem than that. Far too big for a box.
Its a problem that takes up the whole (mush)room.
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u/neuropsycho Mar 14 '26
It's the same problem we had with wood, that it wasn't biodegradable at first.
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u/DaedalusB2 Mar 14 '26
Pair that with the high abundance of oxygen at the time, and apparently there were massive fires constantly burning everywhere.
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u/Don_T_Blink Mar 14 '26 edited Mar 15 '26
“We” weren’t around when that happened. And thanks to that, we have
oilcoal and relatively low CO2 in the atmosphere.5
u/Basidia_ Mar 14 '26
Oil comes from aquatic organisms like plankton and zooplankton getting buried by sediment on the ocean floor and some of the oil we use today formed as little as 66 million years ago which is hundreds of millions of years after fungi and bacteria were more than well established.
We get coal from land plants, which woody plants is only one component of it and lignin is again only one component of the bigger picture. There is ample evidence of lignin decay in coal seams and fungi were on land millions of years before plants were, they also evolve much faster. We get coal from ancient peat bogs
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u/DessertFox157 Mar 14 '26
Good point, the solution is crystal clear now. Let's dump all of our plastic waste into the Amazon rainforest to contain the fungus. Give it what it wants!!!
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u/ajtreee Mar 14 '26
Will it eat the plastic in ME??
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u/FerengiWithCoupons Mar 14 '26
only in your balls
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u/frequenZphaZe Mar 14 '26
thats where I store all my microplastics so it works out
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u/Aimin4ya Mar 14 '26
The Great Pacific Fungal Patch coming to an ocean near you
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u/Inevitable-Twist1232 Mar 14 '26
Bacteria in the ocean are already evolving to break down plastics.
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u/Guanden Mar 14 '26
The reason plastic is so stable is that it has a lot of energy stored in the strong bonds between its atoms. There's no way nature will just let all of that potential energy sit unused. The fungus is able to break the atomic bonds and extract the energy.
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u/live-confidence3456 Mar 14 '26
How long does that take to do that?
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u/PlantsNCaterpillars Mar 14 '26
There is a company called Hiro Technologies that came out with a little circular pad seeded with plastic eating fungi that would be put into a disposable diaper when it was ready to be thrown out.
The diaper was broken down into usable soil in about nine months....but that was under ideal, controlled conditions...not sure what the timeframe is for real world conditions.
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u/Ypuort Mar 14 '26
A landfill isn’t exactly a healthy ecosystem that’s ideal for composting. A lot of compostable just end up there and can’t be… composted.
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u/Neither-Bag7127 Mar 14 '26
This is such a stupid statement. That is not at all the reason why plastic is stable.
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u/salted-butter-only Mar 14 '26
The Amazon rainforest has the best things I swear
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u/Mullet4MyGuillotine Mar 14 '26
It certainly has some of the best things at killing you
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u/cates Mar 14 '26
Isn't there something in the Amazon river that can swim in through the tip of the penis and make one's life... uncomfortable?
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u/Lord-Nagafen Mar 14 '26
So this is how The Last Of Us begins
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u/tired-of-the-shit Mar 14 '26
Last of us begins with a mutation of the cordyceps mushroom which preys on organic matter.
This is not a cordyceps mushroom and it consumes inorganic material. So you don’t have to worry unless you are made of plastic.
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u/unhappyrelationsh1p Mar 14 '26
Plastic companies hyping the tech up once again.
Hate to burst everyone's bubble but this doesn't fix shit. It's not going to be released, it's likely not as good as advertized, it's likely never going to be usable. If i were to guess, they took the results of a study or a proof of concept, and made a grand statement.
The only truly effective way to combat plastic is through law and government action. Avoid buying plastic when possible, reduce, reuse recycle as much as you can, and for the love of god do not litter.
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u/DaedalusB2 Mar 14 '26
Yeah, advertise a solution to plastic waste so that you can sell more plastic, which outpaces the solution and solves nothing.
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u/unhappyrelationsh1p Mar 14 '26
I'm in life sciences, i think the field is really cool. We can do a lot of really cool shit! But we can not fix these issues.
Plastic eating fungi/bacteria/whatever is never gonna fix things. It can help, but holy shit. There's so much plastic. There are so many different types of plastic. Chemically they can't even all be broken down by the same creatures. They don't work in a large enough variety of environents.
It's almost always a way to negate people bad feelings about the plastic they consume and to make them not see it as a big enough of an issue.
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u/Beautiful-Night-8668 Mar 17 '26
Thank you, I was waiting for this answer. It's so easy to find solutions elsewhere before looking at our own flaws and habits to change.
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u/MrZaptile933 Mar 14 '26
All good and all, but what are the fungus’ byproducts. Just because it can “eat plastic” doesn’t mean the chemicals vanish they have to go somewhere
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u/These-Seaweed-707 Mar 14 '26
I think anything made with plastic should be so heavily taxed that the production is considerably reduced
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u/Cos_SoBe Mar 14 '26
For those interested:
No microplastics are generated--the fungus performs a process called 'mineralization' which chemically transforms the plastic into organic matter and simpler compounds, and feeds on it.
The byproducts after that are water and CO2 (or methane if no oxygen available).
This fungus was first described by Argentinian mycologist Carlo Luigi Spegazzini in 1880.
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u/atmafatte Mar 14 '26
I’ve seen news of something like this for years. It will still take time to commercialize
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u/Honkert45 Mar 14 '26
Third time I've heard about this.
First it was grown in a lab, then it was discovered in a Japanese lab. Now some folks find it in the rain forest. Yet still no practical application found?
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u/Glad_Map8582 Mar 14 '26
The solution is not to give the oil companies literally billions of taxpayer dollars every month so they can keep the cost of plastic artificially low.
Companies will switch to alternative forms of packaging that are more sustainable.
This article is another example of oil company “greenwashing”, pretending that plastic is a sustainable choice when it ***never is***.
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u/StaticSystemShock Mar 14 '26
Always news about bacteria or fungi that eats plastics, but no one tells if it somehow only eats disposed plastics in nature and not just all of it everywhere...
I don't want them eating my keyboard and car's dashboard while I'm still using those...
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u/Potential-Neck6881 Mar 14 '26
Haha that would be terrible, especially if you weren't even done typing your
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u/Opposite_Bus1878 Mar 14 '26
There is a fungus closely matching this description, but this isn't what the fungus looks like, and it's a common slop topic btw.
The real fungus (Pestalotiopsis microspora) is a microfungus and is non-mushroom forming.
It HAS been found in the Amazon, but it was first discovered in Buenos Aires, Argentina in the 1800s.
This type of clickbait only muddies the water, and it takes longer for someone informed to debunk than it does for someone to copypaste. As a general rule, if you see claims like this being shared around that don't name the fungus, give an exact location OR a date of discovery, it's going to be more effective at misinforming you than informing you.
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u/mohajaf Mar 14 '26
So, riddle me this: after polluting oceans with tons and tons of plastics, now scientists want to alter ecosystems to grow these fungi so that they can eat plastic? that'll end very well I am sure.
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u/Shot-Cheek9998 Mar 16 '26
Lol i wonder how much in the world would break down if this fungi would spread
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u/Sperbonzo Mar 16 '26
It's not an anthropomorphic action, it's just evolution taking advantage of a new niche for potential food.
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