star-anise:

szhmidty:

star-anise:

auressea:

end0skeletal:

rewind-on-purpose:

This is actually pretty exciting. They’ve found a way to turn plastic into food.

Mushrooms are such amazing things. Most are decomposers, meaning they break stuff down into its original components. Some break down dead wood, or animals, others can break down toxic waste, and apparently this one can break down plastic. How cool is that?

Pestalotiopsis microspora (a mushroom found in the Amazon rainforest) consumes polyurethane, the key ingredient in plastic products, and converts it to organic matter. 

Further, Pestalotiopsis microspora can live without oxygen, which suggests enormous potential for feeding on, and thus cleaning up, landfills.

It takes just a few weeks for the mycelium to start breaking down plastic, and in a few months’ time, the plastic is completely broken down, and all that’s left is a white puffy mushroom. Even if not eaten or used for anything else, the mushroom could be composted and turned in to soil at a much faster rate than that of plastic, which is estimated to take 400 years to decompose on its own.

And there’s more than one! 

https://www.cnn.com/2018/09/12/uk/fungi-plastic-mushrooms-intl/index.html

“Aspergillus tubingensis, which was found in Pakistan, is capable of eroding plastics such as polyester polyurethane, which is often used in refrigerator insulation and synthetic leather.”

🤔 I wonder what it means that whenever I learned about organisms like this in school, it was always as, “IT COULD DESTROY ALL OIL FOREVER! IMAGINE HOW BAD YOUR LIFE WOULD BE WITHOUT PETROLEUM PRODUCTS!!”

I mean, I’m genuinely afraid of something like this infesting a hospital or a pharmaceutical lab.

On the other hand, those labs already have to be on the alert against every other kind of microorganism. They’re already set up to keep things sterile and free of infection. So it’s not like they have every other kind of mold growing on their surfaces, and have to protect against this one in particular. 

(My brother’s a cabinetmaker, and it’s kind of fascinating to hear about the different protocols required for furniture in medical facilities, to prevent the spread of infection. Now there can be no porous surfaces anywhere, and no surfaces that aren’t easy to clean.. Every part of even a receptionist’s desk has to be sealed up like a drum and able to be 100% sanitized.)