“Like panning for gold in a river, bioprospectors travel the world looking to discover interesting and potentially lucrative microbes. In 2019, a team at Gwangju National University in South Korea took a construction drilling rig to the municipal dump outside town, and drilled 15 metres under the trash trenches to reveal decades-old plastic garbage. In it, Prof Soo-Jin Yeom and her students found a variety of the bacterium Bacillus thuringiensis that appeared to be able to survive using polyethylene bags as food.”

From The Guardian.