It sounds like "the start of a joke", says Mikhail Vishnevsky: a joint team of Chinese and Congolese researchers travels to Pakistan. They went because Pakistan has the biggest plastic dumps in the world, and they dug through them looking for fungi living on plastic.
They found several moulds, mostly Aspergillus, sitting on plastic that was crumbling around them. Vishnevsky is a mycologist, a military doctor and the author of more than twenty books on fungi. He explains what the team worked out. The moulds treat a plastic bag the way lichen treats a rock or a piece of bark: as a place to live. Plastic is slippery, so the mould gives off acid and etches grooves into it. The mycelium, the fungus's web of threads, settles into those grooves and holds on. The plastic falls apart mostly by mechanical damage, and even a weak acid does the job.
The Aspergillus work was then shelved, and the reason is dull. Fungi can be made to produce almost anything in a vat, and someone priced it out. Nobody does anything for an extra dollar, so plastic is still burned, because burning is cheapest.
Then another team found something hungrier. Vishnevsky recalls that researchers from Columbia University went to South America and found a tiny sac fungus on the leaves of a tree, something like Alternaria. Take away its other food and it eats plastic. It chews through it the way wood-rotting fungi chew through lignin in a log.
Modern genetics can change a fungus's tastes and turn some of its abilities up or down. From there, Vishnevsky says, only one step was left: telling the fungus that plastic is "your diet forever". The people who got that close were frightened, and he stresses it: really frightened. They could see what happens if a strain built to eat plastic gets out into the world.
We have a plastic civilisation. We are a plastic civilisation. That's it. Back to the Palaeolithic. That's it. Nothing left.
У нас есть пластиковая цивилизация. Мы пластиковая цивилизация. Всё. Откат в палеолит. Всё. Ничего нет.
— Mikhail Vishnevsky, Gleb Solomin Podcast, 33:55
Vishnevsky can't resist the dark joke that follows. Humanity, he says, would be healthy again, and its cheerful hunters would run around burning off the last of the petrol.
Other labs have found plastic-eaters in other places, and their numbers are modest. A study in Science of The Total Environment in 2024, led by Annika Vaksmaa, put a marine fungus, Parengyodontium album, on polyethylene that had been exposed to ultraviolet light. It broke down about 0.05 percent of the plastic a day and turned most of what it broke down into carbon dioxide. A Mycologia paper in February 2025, led by Ronja Steinbach, found that more than 60 percent of the marine fungi collected from coastal waters around Hawaii could degrade polyurethane. Conditioning raised the rate in some strains by up to 15 percent over three months.
Fungi have forced one rebuild of infrastructure already. Vishnevsky points to the railways. Until the early 1900s, house fungi ate wooden sleepers, posts and platforms faster than anyone could replace them. Tsarist Russia's railways hit a problem that creosote and everything else of the time could not fix. Wood is actually better under a train, he says, because it springs and gives more than concrete. Concrete was a forced choice, and fungus still "breaks its teeth on it": there is little carbon in it to eat.
Plastic is made of carbon.
