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Plastic-eating backyard fungi discovery boosts hopes for a solution to the recycling crisis



Australian scientists have successfully used backyard mould to break down one of the world's most stubborn plastics — a discovery they hope could ease the burden of the global recycling crisis within years. Get more news about Plastic Mold,you can vist our website!

Experiments conducted by researchers at the University of Sydney, published in science journal npj Materials Degradation, found that two types of fungi could be harnessed to attack small samples of polypropylene, which is used to make items like takeaway containers, ice-cream tubs and cling film.

The fungi — Aspergillus terreus and Engyodontium album — are usually found in plants and soil.It took 90 days for the fungi to degrade 27 per cent of the plastic tested, and about 140 days to completely break it down, after the samples were exposed to ultraviolet rays or heat.

Chemical engineering professor Ali Abbas, who supervised the research team, said the findings were significant.

"It's the highest degradation rate reported in the literature that we know in the world," the professor said. Despite being recyclable, an estimated 13,500 tonnes of polypropylene ends up in Australian landfill every year because it is contaminated or mixed with other materials.

Professor Abbas said he was "very confident" the technology could be scaled up to process thousands of tonnes of plastic a year, because the same techniques were already being used in different fields. 

"It is scaling up which is very much similar to any kind of fermentation process," he said.

"That technology already exists for those processes and we're able to now borrow that learning from chemical process engineering and bring it into this particular process here."

The challenge for researchers will be expanding any possible solution to address the nation's mounting piles of soft plastic. 

The collapse of the national REDcycle scheme last year exposed big problems with Australia's plastic recycling systems and left most Australians without a way to recycle soft plastic.Researchers will now try to make the degradation process faster and more efficient by tweaking key aspects of the process such as temperatures, the size of plastic particles and how much fungus is used.