Those two dudes in the fenced off city led pretty great lives in The Last of Us. Everyone else suffered terribly though.

Plastic is also such an unspecific term. In regards to biodegradability there is no reason why PE, PP, PVC, PLA, PS and all the others should behave similiarly. Aside from some form of polymerization they are entirely different chemicals.

Quality research is slow my dude.

The trick is that the mushroom would still rather eat literally anything else. So you'd have to gather a pile of only that specific plastic to break down, and now you have the initial problems of why we don't recycle in the first place: 💰

I see this every couple years (I think it's the same). The fungus can only degrade very few plastic types, like Styrofoam.

From other times something like this came up:

1. The rate of conversion is too low
2. It will only eat plastic if other carbon sources aren't available
   Probably more, this is from the top of my head. Also, this will still cause the plastic to eventually be converted into CO2 which is released in the atmosphere.

Do you want to worry about plastic rotting like wood does?

While edible the mushroom tasted like garbage.

Well, everytime I see an article saying "we've found a [mushroom | bacteria | whatever] that eats plastic, yay!", I always think: well, yeah, that's great, but what about all the plastic we don't want eaten just yet?

The amount of micro-plastics in everyone's blood - even in tiny remote villages that have had next to no contact with the outside world - might make human beings look like an attractive meal to them? Surely nothing bad could happen if instead of micro-plastics we all have fungus in our blood?

There are hundreds of different plastics, each chemically different and created for different conditions. At least with heavy metal detoxification, fungi also tend to bioconcentrate what they eat. You can't eat them growing off a hemlock tree without being poisoned by hemlock. Something will eat these and probably get a belly full of petroleum byproducts or whatever it metabolises that into.

Preach.

Everyone wants a silver bullet to the problem. The silver bullet begins and ends with a corporate pocketbook.

But the plastic already is captured carbon. Burning it and then capturing it again makes no sense at all.

If you want to avoid the micro plastic, store it better, that's still much cheaper.

Taxing wasteful uses and protecting life saving uses (sanitization, hospitals, etc). Is the only solution. Treat every other approach as distractions by people who want to profit from the way things are.

Plastic is one of the greatest inventions of all time. But just like nuclear energy, it's also the most deadly to us if we are stupid.

Do you want The Last of Us? Because this is how you get The Last of Us.