Magic mushrooms. (The Beat).Mushrooms are serving a new purpose besides flavoring dishes and sheltering leprechauns. In a promising alternative for toxic waste toxic waste is waste material, often in chemical form, that can cause death or injury to living creatures. It usually is the product of industry or commerce, but comes also from residential use, agriculture, the military, medical facilities, radioactive sources, and cleanup known as mycoremediation, strains of mushrooms are being bred to speed up their natural process of decomposing organic material. The mushrooms' vegetative vegetative /veg·e·ta·tive/ (vej?e-ta?tiv) 1. of, pertaining to, or characteristic of plants. 2. concerned with growth and nutrition, as opposed to reproduction. 3. mycelia act as a biofilter, degrading compounds such as E. coli E. coli: see Escherichia coli. E. coli in full Escherichia coli Species of bacterium that inhabits the stomach and intestines. E. coli can be transmitted by water, milk, food, or flies and other insects. , petroleum compounds, heavy metals heavy metals, n.pl metallic compounds, such as aluminum, arsenic, cadmium, lead, mercury, and nickel. Exposure to these metals has been linked to immune, kidney, and neurotic disorders. , and pesticides without generating secondary waste that must be further treated. Tests conducted so far have cleaned up soils to the point they can be used for landscaping. Battelle Laboratories scientist Jack Word says that edible mushrooms may someday grow in areas once contaminated with nerve gas. |
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