Friday, October 19, 2012

Good morning,

In Larry Niven's science fiction novel 'Ringworld' he describes how a yeast evolved on Earth which lived on polyethylene. It was literally eating the plastic bags off of the grocery store shelves...according to the novel.

While that sounds disastrous, the idea of an organic organism which could biodegrade a non biodegradable material would be an eco engineering miracle.

If only we could discover something like that...

Thanks for reading,

Your Living Green editor

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This week we're talking about fungus two ways. One that can survive exclusively on polyurethane and another that can replace Styrofoam.

Both polyurethane and styrofoam are not biodegradable, so without a solution, all the plastic bottles and old toys we throw out every year will be sitting in landfills for centuries.

Yes, you can recycle plastic, but that just means turning it into another product and recycling hasn't sufficiently slowed the production of new plastic.

According to a Yale study, globally we produced 245 million tons of plastic in 2006, compared to only 1.5 million tons in 1950.

One of the fungi we're looking at is called pestalotiopsis microspora. It was discovered by a group of Yale researchers on an expedition in Ecuador and can subsist on polyurethane alone in airless environments, like the bottom of a landfill.

The other comes from a couple of college friends who discovered that the sticky substance on the bottom of mushrooms called mycelium could be turned into a glue and when that glue is combined with corn husks and other food byproducts it takes on a form similar to Styrofoam. Their company, Ecovative wants used Styrofoam to become mulch, not waste.

A future with less plastic and more mulch, all thanks to fungus.