An international cohort of marine scientists discovered an ocean-borne fungus chomping through plastic trash suspended in the Great Pacific Garbage Patch, as detailed in a new study published in the journal Science of the Total Environment.
Dubbed Parengyodontium album, the fungus was discovered among the thin layers of other microbes that live in and around the floating plastic pile in the North Pacific.
Researchers found that P. album was specifically able to break down UV-exposed carbon-based polyethylene, which is the type of plastic most commonly used to make consumer products, like water bottles and grocery bags — and the most pervasive form of plastic waste that pollutes Earth's oceans.
"It was already known that UV light breaks down plastic by itself mechanically," said study lead author Annika Vaksmaa, a marine biologist and biogeochemist at the Royal Netherlands Institute for Sea Research (NIOZ), in a statement, "but our results show that it also facilitates the biological plastic breakdown by marine fungi."
According to the research, lab-grown P. album was observed to break down a given piece of UV-treated plastic at a rate of roughly 0.05 percent per day for every nine-day period.
Which isn't nothing, but it'd take a very long time for the bacteria to get through the entirety of the Great Pacific Garbage Patch, let alone the millions of metric tons of plastics that enter the ocean every year.
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