Skip to main content

Will Mushrooms be our Ultimate Hero?

    With the continuation of pollutants entering our environment, starting with soil, creates a huge impact as we rely on soil for vegetation and agriculture purposes. With contaminants seeping into soil specifically petroleum, our livestock and crops would be affected, affecting us in the end as we eat them including other soil dependent organisms. Decreasing contaminates in the soil goes through a process called bioremediation, being the most effective way of removing pollutants in soil. How would this work though, what machine can do such a thing? That’s where mushrooms come into play, specifically Agaricomycetes mushrooms. In this study different concentrations of spent mushroom compost were tested in removing petroleum in contaminated soil with or without added soil enriching compounds.  By increasing the amount of mushroom concentration, the lower amount of petroleum was found in soil after. With 10% of spent mushroom compost and fertilizer removed 65% of total petroleum hydrocarbons, so with the added 10% of SMC, contaminated soil with petroleum was seen to degrade over a short span so bioremediation did increase with the addition of mushrooms. By using Agaricomycetes for the degradation of petroleum contaminated soils, not only is this an environmentally friendly technique but by using mushrooms to combat pollutants from entering our soils will be a good sustainable way for farmers etc. to clean up/repair the quality of their soils. The positive impact of using Agaricomycetes to reduce pollutants in soil is environmentally friendly that won’t affect anything negatively as it is a natural process of decomposition just faster and ecofriendly. Cost and benefits for whether a reduction of petroleum contaminants in our soil gets better can easily lower the probability of petroleum getting into water resources that can cause cancer and therefore increase our sustainability.

Reference

M. Maryam Mohammadi-Sichani, M. Mazaheri Assadi, A. Farazmand, M. Kianirad, A.M. Ahadi (2018). Bioremediation of soil contaminated cruel oil by Agaricomycetes.    

Comments

  1. Jessica MedinaNovember 18, 2020 at 2:32 PM

    This was a really interesting topic. I am curious on what properties of the mushroom species in the study allows for it to absorb the petroleum. Thus, I think the next thing to test would be if these mushroom species can survive in different types of environment settings and if there are any limitations in this study.

    ReplyDelete

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Is Hydroelectric Power actually a "Green" Energy Source?

Is Hydroelectric Power actually a "Green" Energy Source? Source: Tennessee Valley Authority (public domain) Greenhouse gases are gases that trap heat in the atmosphere, and the three major greenhouse gases are carbon dioxide, methane, and nitrous oxide. Natural sources of these gases consists of lakes, rivers, streams, and ponds as well. Lakes are environmentally beneficial because they are active, changing, and are important regulators of the three major greenhouse gases. That being said, lakes and reservoirs are known to be built for the purpose of generating power. So much so that water has been retained by dams that the global sea level rise has lowered approximately 0.02 inches per year in the span of 50 years. And since fossil fuels are not utilized to to produce hydroelectric power, lakes are known for their "green" energy sources alternative. Which is a common misconception because it is those lake and reservoirs that release powerful greenhouse gases into t...
Post a Comment
Read more

Leading Innovation: The Untapped Side of Organic Agriculture

By: Jasmine Rodriguez Organic farming as we know it is has taken off as the main system to diversify plant production to a global standard. The innovation and attention to small details of a sustainable metric excels on all four cylinders such as productivity, environmental impact, economic viability and social wellbeing. With high demands globally, there is certainty to a good balance in how farmers produce crops to meet every sustainable goal required. However, the importance in maintaining sustainability is required to for infrastructure to the economic barriers of organic practices to diversify agricultural farming systems. Some practices that lack sustainability include lack of information and knowledge, unreliable infrastructure and economic halts, and misperceptions to cultural biases. A challenge to the farming system is policymakers forming a certain environment to a greater complex arrangement to a standard sustainable distribution of policies with food and ecosystem security...
Post a Comment
Read more

Plastic in the Ocean Floor and Shoreline

 When it comes to the use of plastic, we use them all the time in objects that contain the drinks to the laptops that we use for schoolwork. Once they are thrown away, sometimes they can land in the oceans especially when they can leave close there. Because of this, it has caused a big harm to the marine life environment as more plastic debris has enter the ocean water. It can also cause a harm in the birds as well as thousands of birds can ingest the plastic in confusion of food. This was mention in a study by Jose G.B. Derraik, an study that was mention was in 1995 when Robards et al. examined the guts of seabirds two different times during an interval or 10-15 years that there was an increase in plastic ingestion between the year gaps. Now this is not only implying to birds, but they can also be found in the marine life as well. The reason for this is because not only can they be found in the ocean floor, but they can also be mistaken as food for some of the lifeform as well. Th...
1 comment
Read more