Plastic eating fungus has been found in garbage dump of Islamabad, Pakistan claimed researchers. Researchers have found a species of fungus, known as Aspergillus tubingensis that feed off of plastic. This fungus can grow on plastic itself and breaks down the bonds between the molecules to pull them apart to degrade.
Scientist is of the view that these can be used to treat plastic in water, soil and trash dumps.
One of the defining characteristics of the geological era is a massive amount of plastics that have been manufactured and discarded. Billions of tons of plastic produced are still hanging around in landfills and in the oceans.
Unique environment is fascinating organisms to exploit it. Scientists found mycelium of the fungus colonizes polyester polyurethane plastic, causing surface degradation and scarring.
There have been multiple discoveries of bacteria that are able to break down plastic, and also found that wax worm can naturally degrade plastic, due to its similar structure to that of its natural food beeswax.
These findings are interesting in a number of ways. While researchers have not figured out how we might connect this ability to break down the horrifying amounts of plastic.
The apparent use of these findings would be to degrade the massifs of plastic. A. tubingensis had degraded a sheet of polyester polyurethane to such a degree that it had effectively completely fallen apart after two months in a liquid medium. Experiments are early and very faltering but show proof of concept of such microorganisms can indeed break the plastics down.