Published on January 21, 2026 7:20 PM GMT

Three hundred million years ago, plants evolved lignin—a complex polymer that gave wood its strength and rigidity—but nothing on Earth could break it down. Dead trees accumulated for sixty million years, burying vast amounts of carbon that would eventually become the coal deposits we burn today. Then, around 290 million years ago, white rot fungi evolved class II peroxidases: enzymes capable of dismantling lignin’s molecular bonds. With their arrival, dead plant matter could finally be broken down into its basic chemical components. The solution to that planetary crisis did not emerge from the top down—from larger, more complex organisms—but from the bottom up, from microbes evolving new biochemical capabilities.

It took sixty million years for lignin to become a planetary crisis—and another sixty million for fungi to solve it. Plastics seem like they are on a faster trajectory: In seventy years we’ve gone from 2 million tonnes annually to over 400 million, accumulating 8.3 billion metric tons total, of which only 9% has been recycled. The rest sits in landfills or in rivers, and these piles are projected to reach 12 billion metric tons by mid-century. The scale is compressed, but the problem is the same: Like trees with lignin before the fungi came, plastic is a polymer we have created but cannot unmake

One thing that impressed me very much in Cronenberg’s Crimes of the Future (2022) was its vision of a world in which infectious disease was effectively solved, but we were left with an unreasonable amount of pollution. People were not able to organise themselves to get rid of the pollution, stuck in filthy environments that no longer needed to be cleaned. If infectious disease is solved, a side effect may very well be that “cleanliness” of our water, food, and shelter is indeed no longer required. We can embrace the filth, and ignore it. But the film gestures toward something else: that starting from individual bacteria digesting plastic, developing organs to turn undesirable input to desirable output at scale may indeed be possible. Although the film only held this as a subplot, it was perhaps the thing that impressed me the most about it.

Could the solution then not exist at the higher levels of organismal structures, but at the lower levels? We already employ microbiology to our advantage to clean water of pollutants. Many different mechanisms exist, such as digesting pollutants to simpler soluble forms, or combining them to create sediment which is easier filtered or settled.

The discovery of Ideonella sakaiensis in 2016 at a PET recycling facility in Japan suggests nature may already be evolving solutions. This bacterium uses two enzymes—PETase and MHETase—to break down polyethylene terephthalate into its constituent monomers: terephthalic acid and ethylene glycol. The wild-type bacterium can degrade a thin film of low-crystallinity PET in approximately six weeks. The process remains too slow for industrial application—highly crystalline PET like that in bottles degrades roughly 30 times slower—but researchers have already begun engineering improved variants with enhanced thermostability and activity, suggesting a path toward practical bioremediation.

Pollution is perhaps subjective in and of itself. Piles of cow manure are not directly interesting to us humans, but they become indirectly so: the billions of disorganised organisms that manure hosts convert their environment to its bare essentials, making it a very good source of nutrition for plants. Plants do not necessarily care about whether manure stinks. They will happily absorb its components with their roots. We care about the manure because we care about the plants—and the microbes that go in between us and the partly digested food. Plastic is perhaps not much different in this sense. We simply need an intermediary to help us break it down back into useful, simpler components.

A big problem with decaying plastics is that they are purpose-built to be in-decay-able. Their bonds are too strong. Thermal approaches can break them, but they come with serious costs. Burning plastic creates dangerous and volatile byproducts. Pyrolysis—heating plastic in an oxygen-free environment—avoids direct combustion, but the process is still energy-intensive and emits volatile organic compounds, carbon monoxide, polycyclic aromatic hydrocarbons, particulate matter, and under certain conditions, dioxins and PCBs. Research has found that air pollution from burning plastic-derived fuels carries extreme cancer risks for nearby residents. These byproducts also have the disadvantage of still being foreign to us; we have not studied them and their effects as extensively as we have the plastics themselves.

Even biodegradable and compostable plastics come with large asterisks. Industrially compostable plastics do not necessarily decompose in home composters or in the uncontrolled conditions of the natural environment. PLA, a common “biodegradable” plastic, requires temperatures of 60°C or more—conditions only achievable in industrial composting facilities, which remain scarce. Many composting facilities now refuse bioplastics entirely due to contamination concerns. This seems to leave only pyrolysis or burial on the table—neither of which solves the fundamental problem.

Plastic at all scales will need some kind of process in which it can become useful again. While we seem to be simply incapable of producing less plastics—as in, coming to agreement about how to produce less—the path forward has to be figuring out a sink for the source.

Assuming that the theories in world models hold, that we are soon reaching a collapse state which involves resource depletion and increased pollution, the system altogether seems to convert natural order to a new form of chaos. The system requires the natural order, and is not able to adapt to the chaos it creates. Recycling chaos back into order costs energy, which is (still) abundantly available, but requires solving organisational challenges.

Assuming the business-as-usual case, we are heading towards a world in which we have less clean water, fewer clean environments, fewer resources to sustain our lives, and an increasing amount of dangerous pollution that we are not able to adapt to.

My personal belief is that we are not going to be able to solve these organisational problems because we are not able to organise even our basic assumptions about what is going on. A big reason as to why we have been able to sustain the large-scale organisations of today is that they successfully upheld their promises to provide us with order. Order in terms of clean water, clean food, clean shelter, and the opposite—less pollution, less crime, less ugliness. Imagining a world in which we have less order and more pollution, I then assume that we are going to increasingly desire order over pollution, but not be able to provide it en masse.

It is important to remember again, that, in the grand scheme, we are not going through such systems failures for the first time. These sorts of collapses occurred to our knowledge several times over at a planetary scale, and many more times over in smaller scales in the form of ecological systems collapses. Just as mass extinction happened back then, it will happen again in one form or the other. We are going to suffer terribly as our resources get increasingly polluted and unusable, and we run out of options to tackle the ongoing destruction of systems we inhabit.

Yet… fungi still paved the way to a new era. Sixty million years from now, something else will have found its way with plastic too. The question is whether we can accelerate that timeline, whether we can invest in the microbial solutions that might give us a sink for our source before collapse forces the issue. The organisms that eventually digest our waste will not care about our organisational failures. They will simply do what life does: find a way to extract energy from whatever substrate is available. Will the criminals of the future past still be here to benefit from it?