Qfyilyi

Plastic is a huge problem in our lives. One of the ideas is to engineer plastic eating bacteria or fungi. Experiments already begun, and accidents already happen:

a team of international scientists illustrate how they created—by accident—a new enzyme capable of breaking down plastic bottles.

So let's assume microbe like that was engineered to just eat plastic like it eats sugars and other stuff. Then, containment broke in processing plants next to ten rivers that contribute the most to plastic problems:

1. Yangtze


2. Indus


3. Yellow


4. Hai


5. Nile


6. Ganges


7. Pearl


8. Amur


9. Niger


10. Mekong

How fast can we get this microbes all around the oceans, especially plastic deposits? They will be almost unchallenged on food, because hardly anything else in nature eats plastic, so all real life models look irrelevant to me. On the other hand, I'm not sure if I can just use speed of ocean currents - and if I can, simulating it is above my knowledge at the moment.

You can give this microbe any advantage needed, I want it everywhere as fast as possible to make my apocalypse sudden, and to make world unable to stop it.

The debris generated by the tsunami hitting Japan in 2011 reached US West coast, thus crossed the Pacific Ocean, after few months.

This is your upper limit for the needed time. Add to this that, as opposed to solid debris, bacterial spores can be transported by wind or animals, and your diffusion time significantly shortens.

I.e. take an albatross resting in an infected plastic patch in the middle of the ocean, it will carry the spores hundreds of kilometers away in a matter of few days. And the more they are spread, the further they can spread.