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