As you may know, we are quite the wasteful species. Some countries are better than others at recycling plastics, but these polymeric materials without a doubt are too abundant to fully manage. Every year, more than 300 million tons of plastic are produced, which usually find their way to our oceans, streams, rivers or landfills. Over time, plastics mechanically break down into smaller and smaller pieces. This is when these manmade polymers become an issue, as they are absorbed into photosynthetic algae, ultimately increasing in abundance as they radiate up the food chain in a process called bioaccumulation. Most of the fish we have a taste for are located near the top of the food chain, where toxic compounds like phthalates, and bisphenol are most built up. In many ways, the health of our environments translates to our own health. This is an issue many individuals in the environmental disciplines strive to solve. Well, this week, they took a huge step towards this goal. A new strain of Aspergillus tubingensis has been isolated from a waste disposal site located in Islamabad, Pakistan, that just might aid humans from drowning in a sea of plastic.

Aspergillus tubingensis was originally described in the early 1930’s by Raoul Mosseray. The fungus itself is a borderline extremophile, with a high resistance to ultraviolet light, and a growth temperature optimum on the hot spectrum, compared to most other species (21–36 °C or 70–97 °F). Like many other molds, Aspergillus tubingensis doesn’t have a known sexual form, only producing genetically identical individuals through means of asexual reproduction. This may be a bit of a hurdle if this species is selected for ecological restoration projects to reduce certain types of plastic.