Long before there were trees, the Earth was overrun by giant mushrooms. Fungi first showed up over a billion years ago as three-metre-tall fungus fingers that dominated the landscape, while plants have been around for a paltry 700 million years debuting as scruffy shrubs. A billion or so years on, the humble ‘shroom is an unlikely champion in the war against plastic waste thanks to the discovery of a plastic-eating mushroom.

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The Marvellous Plastic-Eating Mushroom