In Europe, a designer from Austria, Katharina Unger, is working with Utrecht University on “a system that cultivates edible plastic-digesting fungi,” says Wired. “That’s right, you can eat mushrooms that eat plastic.” It’s a follow-on to the discovery in 2012 of a variety of mushroom capable of breaking down polyurethane. “The findings got Unger thinking: What if we could turn an environmental problem (waste) into an environmental solution (food)?” says Wired. At present, it’s a table-top system that takes a couple of months to produce a fluffy, mushroom-like material but researchers are looking for ways to speed up the process.