Plastic-eating whatever evolves in environments of extremely high concentration of plastic and unavailability of anything else. As soon as anything else is available, the plastic-eating thing evolves back to eating something else.
If you had nothing to eat you'd also give plastic a try, and you could miraculously be the chosen one who can break down plastic, but you'd switch back to normal food as soon as possible.
It's the same dynamic as with antibiotics resistant bacteria. Given enough time, something will probably appear that does not pay a high price to digest plastic (or can even use the mechanism for other material), and doesn't evolve back when other food is available.
If it's bacteria, then soon the entire world will be full of plastic-digesting bacteria. If it's fungus, it will start to appear here and there at random.
Many of the plastic-eating microbes require very specific conditions: finely shredded material, high temperatures (55C or more), carefully-controlled pH, etc.
These generally won’t occur outside of a bioreactor, so you’re not going to see them attacking random plastics in your house.
Because then another question arises: what breaks down the fungus?
Edit:
This question is serious. If this fungus would eat all that plastic, this would introduce a huge amount of new life in the ocean with unknown effects to the ecosystem. We would replace one problem with another.
I had the EXACT same thought. If the fungi eats plastic, what eats the fungi? I find this a veri legitimate question.
I assume/hope that it doesn't turn/get converted to a plasticofungi that cannot be eaten by fish/etc. This would only reshape the pollution, not eliminate it.
I didn't find an answer to this in this specific article; I hope it will be covered somewhere else.
Well, the fungi "breaks down plastic", which means that it converts it into other types of molecules. Just plants use C02 + H20 + sunlight in photosynthesis to convert it into O2 + glucose.
If we could break down the molecules ourselves we would have done it already, but it's not easy to do that. That is why we benefit from these natural occurring organisms that break them down and leave a more useful byproduct (to us). Although nano technology can eventually give us the ability to do this in a controlled way.
