"To Sehroon Khan, a scientist at the Kunming Institute of Botany in the province of Yunnan, China, exploring a new garbage dump is kind of like going to the grocery store. “You know that if you go to a vegetable market, you can find all types of vegetables easily,” Khan says. “If you go to a garbage or dumping site where there are many plastic wastes, there must be a microorganism that can degrade it.”
In 2017, Khan and a team of other scientists collected a sample of a previously undiscovered strain of fungus on top of a garbage dump in Islamabad, Pakistan. When they took it back to China to study in the laboratory, the species of fungus, a previously undiscovered strain of the species Aspergillus tubingensis, was able to break down polyurethane—common in industrial settings and used in refrigerators, fake leather, and many other applications—in just weeks instead of decades. The fungus secretes enzymes that break down the plastic’s chemical bonds and uses its mycelia—filaments fungi grow that are much like a plant’s roots—to break apart the plastic further.
Although there have been studies in the past highlighting fungus species that can degrade plastics, these species are rare, and Aspergillus tubingensis has never been found to do so before. The new strain “has potential to be developed into one of the tools desperately needed to address the growing environmental problem of plastic waste,” according to Kew Gardens’ State of the World’s Fungi report."
