An awesome study that could help clean up rivers world-wide at negligible cost leveraged fungi as a pollution control filter.
The mushrooms in question were the very delicious and very helpful turkey tail, and the pollution in question was sewage: notably E. coli bacteria.
The river was in the English county of Devon and the results were so great that water industry regulator OFWAT gave local utility Anglican Water almost $2 million to implement the idea at scale.
Similar success was had in Lincolnshire, where the mushrooms were instead used to clean up agricultural runoff of phosphorous and nitrogen which can cause abnormal blooms of algae that choke waterbodies of oxygen.
The application was ever so simple: a bag of woodchips impregnated with turkey tail spores left at the bottom of the river. The mycelia, or filament system of the mushroom, filtered out 80% of the E. coli, 83% of the phosphorous, and 35% of the nitrogen.
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Joshua Mercer, at Anglian Water said the fungi would act as a “second line of defense” to normal sewage treatment.
“If [this work] can have a positive impact on water quality, then it’s benefiting everyone,” Joshua told the BBC.
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“When my daughter gets to my age, it would be great if people can just go and swim wherever they want.”
GNN has already reported how mushrooms can act as exceptional cleaning agents, with the ability to absorb harmful heavy metals, and even nuclear radiation.
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