Mushrooms clean up pollution

There is a town 130 miles away from San Francisco called Fort Bragg.

That is Fort Bragg. It is quite gorgeous except for the building.

In this town, a pollutant, dioxin, is infesting the area of a former lumber mill.

How do they want to clean the dioxins?

With mushrooms.

There are two types of mushrooms native to the North that is dioxin-degrading:

Turkey Tail:

And Oyster mushrooms:

I eat oyster mushrooms. My family just finished off a 5lb bag of oyster mushrooms last week.

Mushrooms being used to clean up oil spill are nothing new. It is a process called bioremediation. In this process pollution-eating organisms like fungi or green plants are fed with fertilizer, oxygen and anything else that makes it grow faster. As defined on this site, it “uses microorganisms or their enzymes to return the environment altered by contaminants to its original condition.”

However, it hasn’t been used to clean dioxins. Dioxin is the second most toxic man-made chemical. Number one goes to radioactive waste.

There is no safe level of dioxin exposure according to the Department of Toxic Substances Control. Constant exposure to dioxin can lead to cancer.

There is a lot of contaminated soil because of the dioxins made from the lumber mill. Normally contaminated soil gets taken away to be burned or buried.

What the town hopes to do is use the mushrooms by putting it in plots, sprinkled with straw then left alone with the mushrooms spawning. Then, it is supposed to release a threadlike web called mycelium that secretes enzymes which causes the toxins to fall apart.

Since mushrooms haven’t been used to clean dioxins, sometime this year the town will try a test of mushrooms on a truck loads worth of contaminated soil.

Article from New York Times.