[preston4tw]

There's a fun trashy sci-fi novel I read years ago about how potentially devastating it would be if a plastic-eating microbe got loose: https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/2368220.Mutant_59

It reads like a summer disaster movie, entertaining but mostly forgettable. What was interesting about the book was as a thought experiment about the use of plastics in critical infrastructure and how much of a nightmare plastic-eating anything could be.

[kragen]

I think the backstory of the Ringworld series was that a superconductor-eating microbe destroyed civilization on the Ringworld, and restarting it was impossible because there were no metals or fossil fuels to mine. On the plus side, on actual Earth, at least most of the metals are still in the landfills.