Microbes discovered that can digest plastics at low temperatures

It's also kind of sad , for all of human history we never had this wonder material like plastic , light , strong , moldable , cheap and very importantly resistant to chemicals , pests and microbial destruction and in the few decades that we have had it we are scrambling to look for bacteria that will digest them because we over did it .

This is newsworthy because the bacteria can function at lower temperatures (15 C) than previous bacteria discovered.

I have no idea of the actual data, but I believe that percentage in waste plastics of those kinds (PE+PUR+PBAT+PLA) are something like:

95.0% PE

3.9% PUR

1.1% PBAT+PLA

so, even if these newly found microbes are effective and come into use they probably won't make in practice much a change, and - as you say - every year it comes out some article about research on these microbes (including some with potential for "eating" PE) but no news about them being used industrially.

Ill Wind by Kevin J. Anderson?

"...et in pulverem reverteri", a short story by Janusz Zajdel (up there with Lem of Solaris fame) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Janusz_Zajdel

TLDR: Someone invents catalyst able to encode any material with programmable expiry date. Every country adopts it to ensure steady employment across planet. Pants? 3 months and revert back to dust, wrist watch? 1 year, car? 2 years, etc.

Can only find Polish copy https://web.archive.org/web/20170722210628/http://zajdel.dza... google translate doesnt like this particular web.archive link so you would have to manually copy text to translate

Was this how Ring World fell?

A recycling bacteria got out of control and ate the infrastructure and the machines.