Mushroom that eats plastic

A little while ago a facebook friend mentioned about an amazonian mushroom that can eat non-biodegradable plastic. My first reaction was 'Wow! that's great' but then I began to wonder - if the mushroom was in the rain forest, how do scientists know that it can eat plastic? Is there any such plastic lying around in the rain forest? I looked on websites that tell you about hoax rumours etc but didn't find anything there. I kept thinking about it so decided to browse around and try to find out more.

There are two websites in particular that clarify the situation. They are, gizmodo.com/5880768/amazonian-mushroom-eats-indestructible-plastics and herbeyclopedia.com/index.php?option=com_zoo&task=item&item_id=3. The mushroom is called Pestalotiopsis Microspora. It was discovered in the Ecuadorian Rain Forest but apparently lives in various parts of the world. Some students from Yale university in the US took samples back to their lab and began doing experiments and that is how they discovered that it actually consumes polyurethane, the plastic that has become such a problem in the world as it takes hundreds of years to destroy it. This surely seems to be the solution the world has been waiting for. What good news if there is a mushroom that can devour the plastic waste that we so freely disgard.

This table gives a good idea of how many different uses polyurethane has just in the US

(this data is taken from 2004; its use seems to increase by 5% every year

This special mushroom can live in air or without it. So it can be used to clean the oceans of all the plastic that is polluting so much of our planet. It's ideal condition for growth would seem to be at the bottom of landfill sites, among all the plastic and without sunlight or air! The other benefit from this mushroom is that it produces taxol and that is already used in the treatment of cancer. It seems almost too good to be true. And that is the problem. What if it cannot be controlled? What if it somehow spreads out from underneath the rubbish heaps or moves from the ocean to the land? As the table above shows we use polyurethane in so much of our daily living - insulation, synethetic fibres, plastic for electronics and sealants etc - what if it began to invade our homes? It sounds like something from a sci-fi horror movie: 'The invasion of the gadget-eating fungus' It seems like the solution to one problem creates another. Maybe the best thing is to just drastically reduce the amount of non-biodegradable plastic that we use and throw away so easily.