Is Mushroom A New Solution To The Ever Increasing Plastic Waste?

By Author: GyanPro Edu
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Imagine a life without any plastic around! No carry bags given in the market. No plastic containers to keep things. No plastic packaging of foods and drinks. No plastic anywhere! Life would have been so difficult if there was no plastic. Everywhere around us, we use plastic in one way or another. Every single person on earth is using plastic today. The use of plastics has increased a lot over the decades and this has become an environmental monster, degrading and deteriorating our beautiful nature!
Our dependence on plastic has increased a lot. Stopping the use of plastic completely is one solution to the over use of this environmental monster but this cannot be done because plastic has become a need now. The other way to decrease the environmental menace is to use biodegradable plastic. This is a better option but even that would take months to decompose. So, a lot of research was done and finally scientists found a way to decompose the plastic waste that would not take generations to decompose!

Mushrooms eating up plastic! Sounds crazy, isn’t it? How can a mushroom eat plastic and solve the problem of plastic ...
... waste on earth!
There is always a solution to everything and so even for the decomposition of plastic waste, there are smart and brilliant minds who discovered a mushroom which only eats plastic!
This is not the everyday mushroom which we eat. Austrian designer Katharina Unger together with Julia Kaisinger and Utrecht University in Netherlands researched and found a very useful fungus that could help to convert the plastic into an edible substance!

This useful fungi, scientific name Pestalotiopsis microspora, was first found in 2012 at the jungles of Ecuador by a group of students from Yale’s annual Rainforest Expedition and Laboratory. This fungus was found to survive only by eating the major component of plastic: Polyurethane. Adding to its surprising feature, it is active even in anaerobic environment as well!

To read more about these mushrooms, visit the following website:
https://gyanpro.com/blog/is-mushroom-a-new-solution-to-the-ever-increasing-plastic-waste/