Yale Discovers a Fungus That Eats Plastic

http://www.pcworld.com/article/249216/yale_discovers_a_fungus_that_eats_plastic.html

by MRonney • 14 years ago

284 80 14 years ago

As programmers we are always attuned to thinking about the edge cases and endgames, so I wonder:

Would be possible that such a fungus proliferated into a sort of "termite for plastic", feeding on plastic piping (in houses or cars maybe) and the like.

Of course house owners already deal with mold so I suppose this would just be another one.

The article suggests introducing it into landfills to eat the plastic. Kudzu was introduced to America to control soil erosion. The invasive vine now spreads at a rate of 150,000 acres a year, so it certainly accomplished goal A.

samstave2• 14 years ago

>The invasive vine now spreads at a rate 150,000 acres [per what]

150K acres [per year]? or per what metric.

sunsu• 14 years ago

150,000 acres annually.

morsch• 14 years ago

Metric? That'd be about 607 km^2 [per what].

jluan• 14 years ago

I think this could be a good thing even if it did occur. We will be forced to significantly curtail our dependence on petroleum as a result.

ars7• 14 years ago

No, quite the opposite. We use plastic because it uses the _least_ petroleum of all structural materials.

If not for plastic we would have to use wood or metal, and both would take FAR more energy to work with and ship.

VMG2• 14 years ago

The article says that the fungus digests polyurethane - maybe if the fungus is focused on one type of plastic that will only be used for disposable products, the problem can be avoided?

ars7• 14 years ago

Plastic pipes are not made from polyurethane. Virtually nothing structural is made from polyurethane, so we are safe even if it proliferated.

Polyurethane is mainly used for foams, coatings and sealants.

It's common to lump all plastic together, but they are actually VERY different and things that will destroy one type will have no effect on another.

jerf• 14 years ago

The ability of bacteria to consume and destroy infrastructure is bounded by energy and resource considerations. Observe that we use wood for structures all the time, a material that can be consumed by any number of very common bacteria that we don't need to hypothesize about, yet properly cared-for wood can last hundreds of years.

m_for_monkey• 14 years ago

True, but we didn't care for plastic the same way, because we didn't need to. Until now. It's not the end of the world, of course, but we should prepare for this problem.

nsedlet• 14 years ago

The article is scant on details, but it does say that researchers want to use the enzyme extracted from the fungus to break down plastics, not introduce the fungus itself to our piles of garbage. This makes it a bit different from the case of the Kudzu vine.

andrewflnr• 14 years ago

It does mention the bacteria's anaerobic metabolism as an advantage, allowing it to live deep in landfills.

JonnieCache2• 14 years ago

>Kudzu

In europe we have a similar problem with japanese knotweed. In the UK it's classed as "controlled waste" and has to be disposed of using chemicals. It's illegal to wilfully spread it.

https://secure.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/wiki/Japanese_knot...

joshuahedlund• 14 years ago

This could be great news for the 3D printer industry.

firemanx• 14 years ago

This reminds me of the book Ringworld and the "Fall of Cities" - the civilization had become dependent on a particular superconductor, and wired it into everything. A microorganism that fed off of the superconductor came along and spread like wildfire. The side-effect was that it essentially wiped out the civilization because their entire energy infrastructure was built around this stuff.

Hopefully these guys know what they are doing :)

dsr_• 14 years ago

Also, another book from the same era, _Mutant 59: The Plastic Eaters_. Davis and Pedler. Pointed out the ubiquity of plastic with a grey goo scenario.

ChuckMcM• 14 years ago

I was thinking the same thing. Getting a colony of this stuff established in the voids and nether regions of say a wide body jet would not be a very good thing at all.

pavel_lishin• 14 years ago

I imagine that jets are inspected often enough for something like this to be caught. I imagine that a bigger problem would be an infection getting loose in a manufacturing factory. How much of my laptop is edible?

brador• 14 years ago

How would they have identified this fungus for it's properties in the Amazon rainforest? Do they just leave a piece of plastic near a tree and come back to see if anything's growing on it?

swalsh• 14 years ago

Perhaps a scientist took a sample, and the sample ate through the dish?

rflrob2• 14 years ago

Scanning through the abstract[1], it seems pretty likely to me that they did the actual screening in a lab, and it's merely that the fungus was originally from the rainforest. In fact, one of the 21 authors on the paper is from a Peruvian university, and he's likely the one who's group originally isolated the fungus.

[1] http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/21764951

samstave2• 14 years ago

I'd love to see if it could be waterborn.

It would be great to have something eating all the plastic in the oceans other than the fish. And we really REALLY need to start doing something about the trash gyres in the seas.

artmageddon• 14 years ago

I'm definitely for cleaning up the gyres, but how do we know that this is something that can be controlled? It's not just plastic that's floating around, either. I'll note that this is a tremendous discovery and I hope we can see it through..

ars7• 14 years ago

Don't get overly excited. It eats polyurethane which is rarely found in garbage compared to other plastics.

drstrangevibes3• 14 years ago

the last paragraph is the most depressing part, just as weve found a sustainable ecological solution to problem of plastic, we learn that someone has commoditized it into a chemical solution, which no doubt has the accompanying legal patent absurdities,few if any positive environmental interactions and actually endangers a very special species due to corporate anti competative behaviour. Irony anyone?

chc• 14 years ago

What on earth are you talking about? How does isolating the enzyme hurt the environment (more than the creature itself would) or endanger the species?

drstrangevibes3• 14 years ago

the environment is a holistic function of living symbiotic relationships. Isolating an enzyme and spraying it on a field is about as environmentally friendly as covering a field in pus and saying its ok because it comes from nature.

goodweeds• 14 years ago

There was an article about something similar on Slashdot a decade ago about CD/DVD-eating fungi.

http://science.slashdot.org/story/01/06/18/1317218/cd-eating...

javanscala• 14 years ago

Wasn't this already done? http://www.mnn.com/green-tech/research-innovations/blogs/boy...

rflrob2• 14 years ago

Reading the paper (paywalled, unfortunately), it seems that the big breakthrough was not that a microbe can degrade polyurethane (there's almost a dozen other citations), but that this one can do it both aerobically and anaerobically. That means that you can introduce it to a dump, and it will work in both the deep and surface layers.

[1]http://aem.asm.org/content/77/17/6076.abstract

semenko• 14 years ago

Yep --

The discovery here is an endophytic (living in a plant) fungus that can grow anaerobically, using polyurethane as its sole carbon source.

The authors suggest fungi that digest polyurethane have been known for decades. ("""Enzymatic degradation of PUR has been demonstrated by both fungi (4, 5, 6, 19) and bacteria (14, 17, 23).""")

They cite one reference from 1968, which itself implies polyurethane-degrading fungi had been known long before then:

"Fungal susceptibility of polyurethanes." Darby, R.T, and A.T. Kaplan. 1968. Appl. Microbiol. 16:900–905. http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/16349806

Craiggybear• 14 years ago

Sooooo Andromeda Strain.

lutusp• 14 years ago

I had hoped to craft a joke about a scientist's iPad disintegrating halfway through his presentation, but that topic has been covered. So instead I'll object to "Yale discovers ...". Really? Yale did it? Imagine a world in which that's the rule -- imagine a headline in 1905 saying "Swiss patent office discovers new theory about the universe."

robryan• 14 years ago

Seems reasonable enough to me. It would be different if the ex student had completed their studies at Yale and went on to research something different independent of Yale. Here though it sounds like they were funding it and that it was a continuation of research being done while a student.

antics• 14 years ago

Do you know why we have oil and coal?

When all those carbon-based life forms died all those years ago, there was nothing to break them down. So they persisted, and the result is oil and coal.

I've often wondered whether a similar thing would happen to all this plastic lying around. I suppose it's still sort of a toss-up, but now I'm at least sort of convinced that it's vaguely possible.

masklinn• 14 years ago

> When all those carbon-based life forms died all those years ago, there was nothing to break them down.

There was nothing to break them down not because such a thing did not exist but because they were protected from those organisms: they were buried under anoxic conditions (complete lack of oxygen) or beneath acidic waters, shielding the organic matter from that which would normally degrade it by feeding on it.

publicus• 14 years ago

You need to research the abiotic origin of oil.

gerggerg2• 14 years ago

Any one know what the by-products of the fungus' metabolism are?

ars7• 14 years ago

Polyurethane, like virtually all plastics is made of nitrogen, carbon, hydrogen and oxygen. So the byproducts are things like water, carbon dioxide, ammonia, alcohol.

Plastics burn really well, they are not actually that hard to destroy safely - their decomposition products are very clean if the fire is hot enough.

kragen3• 14 years ago

It's possible to burn polyurethane safely, but it's not trivial. If you burn it at low temperatures, you get hydrogen cyanide, and if you burn it (or, in air, anything) at high temperatures, you get deadly nitrogen dioxide instead. You can get rid of the nitrogen dioxide with sufficient effort; http://www.aat.cc/store.asp?pid=26808, for example, sells a six-stage air scrubber system using a sequence of strong oxidizing and reducing agents.

In short, "not actually that hard to destroy safely" is wildly off the mark.

Your other statement is wildly off the mark, too. Metabolic byproducts are incredibly diverse, including all of the chemical compounds produced in the course of an organism's life cycle. One of the organisms studied in this paper was Aspergillus niger, whose metabolism produces, among other things, aflatoxin. EDIT: Oops, WRONG. It's other Aspergillus species that produce aflatoxin, sorry. A. niger is mostly notable for producing 99% of the citric acid in your food.

ajkessler• 14 years ago

This seems like the most important question... Since the paper is paywalled, and science reporting is terrible, can someone with access inform us just what the hell the fungus turns the plastic into?

bcn• 14 years ago

http://aem.asm.org/cgi/reprint/AEM.00521-11v1.pdf

gerggerg2• 14 years ago

I'm hoping it's gold. That way we can all get rich.

VMG2• 14 years ago

Landfills are not the problem.

The plastic waste that isn't on landfills is.

kenrik• 14 years ago

Now that's great news! I would be interested in the environmental impact of this fungus though. It would not be a good thing if the fungus turns out to cause more damage than the plastic itself.

One of the most important things we learned from early 20th century conservationist movement was that to "preserve" something the best thing you can do is leave it alone. Every time they tried to correct something in a ecosystem something else would break. They messed up a lot of Stuff in yellowstone until they learned to just let it be.

DilipJ• 14 years ago

this fungus could end up contributing to global warming, by taking the carbon that is trapped as plastic on the ground and releasing it eventually into the atmosphere.

jsilence• 14 years ago

I always thought that some day in the future we would start digging up the dumped plastic for turning it back into oil or fuel.

There is another fungus which is capable of turning cellulose from wood into diesel. A fungus which could digest plastic into fuel would be great. http://www.ens-newswire.com/ens/nov2008/2008-11-04-02.asp

Of course this fungus should not be injected into the dump sites. Better dig up the plastic and have it converted into fuel in a chemical plant.

rdl• 14 years ago

Yeah, we already mine tailings from old mines, since the old mining processes were less efficient, and those tailings are now considered economically recoverable ores.

fr3ak• 14 years ago

Yeah. A lot of plastics are 100 percent recyclable. Eventually you just mine the landfill if it is worthwhile. No? Destroying the plastic seems a waste.

Possible selection and confirmation bias as I design plastic products.

durkie• 14 years ago

A ton of them are recyclable in their pure state, but I get the impression that a lot of seemingly mundane plastic products these days are actually surprisingly complicated mixes/composite materials: I know something simple like a potato chip bag is at least a 3-layer composite structure, and you've got inks from the label, metal from the barrier layer, polypropylene from the film, and polyethylene from the adhesive layer.

On top of that, the polypropylene film itself is likely a multilayer structure of different copolymers and crystallinities, and it all turns a crappy little thing like a chip bag in to something damn hard to recycle.

mkmk• 14 years ago

This is the full paper, as linked from reddit: http://view.samurajdata.se/psview.php?id=f1de9924&page=1...

The pageturn navigation is in the upper left hand corner.

zellyn• 14 years ago

I'm confused by the "exclusively subsists on polyurethane" and "scientists recently found a fungus in the Amazonian rainforest"... TIL there's a bunch of polyurethane in the Amazonian rainforest?

blacksmith_tb• 14 years ago

That caught my eye, too. Rather than having evolved to eat polyurethane only, and then waiting patiently for us to arrive with dinner, I took this to be an awkward way of reiterating that the fungus is the only organism we know of that can eat PU. Which does make me wonder a bit about what it normally eats - resins?

JonnieCache2• 14 years ago

I read it as "capable of subsisting on polyurethane only" in the lab.

jilebedev• 14 years ago

There are two competing methods, as far as I see: use the bacteria themselves to digest plastic, or use extract the enzyme responsible for plastic dissolution and manufacture it the enzyme responsible for plastic dissolution.

1. Bacteria:

  - Can they adapt to the climate and the ecology of their target environment? 
  - Can they adapt, in particular, to oceanic salt water to dissolve dumped plastic waste? 
  - Overpopulation: what are the consequences? Do natural predators of this bacteria exist? 
  - Underpopulation: can the bacteria be genetically modified to survive in landfills or oceans? Must they be isolated in a controlled environment with plastic?

2. Manufacturing

  - If the enzyme/manufacturing process is controlled by a profit-seeking corporation, would this mean unequal pollution capabilities between the developed and developing worlds? I suspect more plastic waste is improperly disposed by developing countries - thus further exacerbating the problem. 
  - Must the bacteria manufacture the enzyme necessary, or can an enzyme be chemically manufactured? 
  - Does the enzyme have an optimal/useful operating temperature? The Amazon rainforest is not only a freshwater environment, but also a relatively warm climate. Our waste may be captured by cold ocean currents or be present in countries simply far too distant from the equator for this to be a feasible option.

3. Process consequences

  -What are the products of plastic dissolution by this bacteria? 
  -If the process is performed inefficiently/incompletely due to some environmental factors (water salinity, pH, temperature), are there any harmful byproducts? 
  -If the process produces simple chemicals - do these harm other organisms in the environment surrounding the bacteria? 
  -Would the accumulation of the products (CO2 gas for example) further global warming or pollution?

This article leaves me yearning for more details.

dhruvbird• 14 years ago

This is actually huge!! However, I wonder if uncontrolled growth would lead to something even more terrible.

_pius• 14 years ago

Having Andromeda Strain flashbacks.

turing• 14 years ago

One interesting thing that this article fails to mention is that the fungus was discovered by an undergraduate student. Jon Russell, the lead author of the paper, graduated last spring, and he originally discovered the fungus in Spring 2008. Yale offers a class that pays for students to spend Spring Break in the Ecuadorian rainforest collecting samples. The class also includes a stipend for students to continue their research projects during the summer following the course.

gjuggler• 14 years ago

One of my greatest regrets from undergrad days was having graduated a year too early to enroll in this course. Scott Strobel was something of a visionary for setting it up, and it seems to have paid off with at least one cool result -- not to mention, a handful of students who now know how it feels to find something new.

I wish more professors would actively engage their students in "real" research projects, i.e. beyond the usual cookie-cutter laboratory lessons or follow-a-grad-student internships. Sure, it's more work for everyone involved, but experiences like this are the best way to convert bright students into real scientists, IMO.

EREFUNDO5• 14 years ago

So if life started 6,000 years ago when there were no plastic, does this mean that this fungus was a recent creation?

EREFUNDO5• 14 years ago

Whoever voted negative on this comment does not fully understand my point. I am pointing out how ridiculous it is to believe that all life started 6,000 years ago and all species were already made exactly as they are. The fact that this particular fungus is surviving by eating plastic simply states that evolution happened and is still happening. Or maybe he did fully understand but just got offended by my mockery of the Judeo-Christian-Islamic version of how the universe, the world, and life began.

ComputerGuru2• 14 years ago

Or maybe they understood you and thought that your hate mongering vitriol doesn't belong here. No one brought up evolution or creationism here but you.

sharmajai2• 14 years ago

This reminds me of a YouTube video, I saw within the last ten days here, where a stand-up comedian talks about, how the planet does not need saving, it will find out ways to save itself. I can't find it now though.

Scientists cannot find a way to degrade plastic does not necessarily mean plastic is not bio-degradable.

I have found time and time again, that stand-up comedians are the ones who make the most serious points.

EDIT: Found it - http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eScDfYzMEEw

hxcloud99• 14 years ago

Was it George Carlin, by any chance?

sharmajai2• 14 years ago

Yes indeed it was him.

renownedmedia• 14 years ago

Andromeda Strain!

hansy• 14 years ago

What is the byproduct after consumption of polyurethane?

jentulman• 14 years ago

is it edible too? Two birds with one stone(effect plastic garden ornament)

sireat• 14 years ago

This topic was rather fully explored in a 1971 book: Mutant 59: The plastic eaters by http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kit_Pedler and Gerry Davis (both affiliated with Dr. Who)

As a kid that book seemed captivating(scenes of disintegrating airplane, sewage exploding etc.), upon rereading it some years later the plotting and characters seem hackneyed.

Yale Discovers a Fungus That Eats Plastic

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