Coconut husk fungus can degrade sunscreen and plastic

The husk of a coconut does more than hold water. Fungus living in that fiber can break down sunscreen and plastic. A high school student in Hawaii found this by growing the husk's own microbes in a lab and feeding them the pollutants.

Vera Wang is a senior at Kaiser High School. Her research runs out of Anthony Amend's lab at the University of Hawaii at Manoa. She worked with Kaylee Christensen, a graduate student in marine biology, on the fungal communities that call coconut husk home.

Wang did not start with plastic. The year before, she built an ocean filter that pulls sunscreen and microplastics off the surface of water. The design drew on traditional Polynesian weaving, and she made the whole thing from coconut byproducts. The filter worked. It trapped the pollution. It did not answer what to do with the mess afterwards.

So she looked at the coconut again. The fiber's open pore structure lets air and water move through it, which keeps microbes alive. Wang grew the fungi living in husks and tested them against sunscreen and plastic media. They degraded both. A tannin compound in the fiber can even flag which fungi are doing the eating.

The genetics get stranger. Several of the species turned up no match in the world's largest database of known genes and genomes. They may be organisms nobody has catalogued, sitting unnoticed on a common fruit husk.

The project swept awards at the 2026 Hawaii State Science and Engineering Fair, including best in category for microbiology and third best in fair. It earned Wang a slot at the International Science and Engineering Fair in Phoenix. None of this is a working cleanup system yet. It is evidence that a waste people toss without thinking already carries something that eats two stubborn marine pollutants. The full writeup is on the University of Hawaii site: https://www.hawaii.edu/news/2026/05/11/coconut-fungi-decompose-plastic/

■ Filed from Mycelial Workshop: the Fungi, Earth wing of the city.