A solution for the Pacific Garbage Patch?


Plastic eating fungi found in Amazon.

For decades we have known that the Amazon is home to more species than almost anywhere else on Earth. Amazon Rainforest constitutes the world’s largest “pharmacy” yielding thousands of previously unknown substances found no where else. Compounds from tropical flora relieve headaches, help treat glaucoma and provide muscle relaxants used during surgery. The Amazon Rainforest has also yielded guanine for the treatment of malaria and periwinkle for the treatment of leukemia. Given the rainforest’s teeming biological diversity, its value to humanity as a laboratory of natural phenomena and as a medical storehouse is priceless.

Recently, the “pharmeceutical” benefits of the Amazon have been expanded to the potential of healing the Earth from the plague of plastic waste. A group of Yale students discovered, quite by accident, a fungus that appears to be quite happy eating plastic in airless landfills. This fungus shows a voracious appetite for a very common group of plastics: polyurethane.

The Amazon is home to many species

Human beings have only begun to catalog & name the creatures that live here. Home to thousands of varieties of flowering plants, the rainforest supports endless varieties of hummingbirds, butterflies & insects such a the rhinoceros beetle and the army ant. It is also home to the spider monkey, pink & gray dolphins, Amazon river otter, piranha, anaconda, jaguar, blue and yellow macaw, toucan, harpy eagle, fishing bat, tapir sloth, tarantula, Cayman crocodile, manatee, etc.

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