Mycoremediation
Imagine all the plastic trash you accumulate from one trip to the grocery store, from water bottles and children’s toys to clamshell containers and cosmetic microbeads. Now imagine enough trash to equal the weight of one billion elephants, and you’ll have some sense as to the amount of plastic we’ve discarded since the 1950s.
Plastics are now humanity’s number one source of pollution, accounting for 20-30 percent of landfill volume worldwide, while an additional 12 million metric tons are dumped annually into our oceans. As each piece can take millennia to decompose completely, our discarded plastics form vast trash islands called “gyres”—there’s even one the size of Texas—where marine species mistake the toxic, increasingly-microscopic particles for plankton and other food sources.
With plastic consumption still on the rise, it’s a fast-compounding problem no one quite knows how to solve, but Peter McCoy is one of many who believe the answer has been under our feet the whole time. “Plastics have been known as susceptible to fungal degradation since they were first manufactured over 100 years ago,” explains McCoy, who founded the grassroots research organization Radical Mycology, which advocates for underutilized applications of mushrooms and other fungi. Read more about Mycoreremediation…
YCG will be hosting a mushroom growing workshop. Click here to book for the Mushroom workshop
What is biochar?
Join Urban Kulture for a wonderful presentation and hands-on skill development in gourmet mushroom cultivation. Learn how to grow your own Oyster mushrooms as we take you through the steps of mushroom cultivation with a focus on using urbanly available waste products all in a fun and friendly environment!
growing Oyster mushrooms in 2015 for their incredible nutritional value and out of sheer curiosity. She quickly became fascinated with the process of working with mycelium from it’s very beginnings on Petri dishes in a lab in preparation to grow on many different growing mediums including coffee grinds, sugarcane mulch and other organic waste products. Kayt believes that knowledge should be shared, so it’s fitting that she is collaborating with Australia wide Mycological educators Urban Kulture to deliver workshops in the South East Queensland region and looks forward to sharing this wonderful process.
Advances in soil science & microbiology show us how we can eliminate the need for fertilisers, herbicides, pesticides or fungicides in crops and gardens. Soils can be drought-proofed, plant pathogens controlled and both yield and nutrient density greatly enhanced; with reduction of your labour an additional benefit.
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