Jae Rhim Lee: My Mushroom Burial Suit
In this TED talk, artist Jae Rhim Lee explores the connection between us, human beings, and our planet; between life and death; between art, culture, and environmentalism.
Can we commit our bodies to a cleaner, greener Earth, even after death? Naturally — using a special burial suit seeded with pollution-gobbling mushrooms. Yes, this just might be the strangest TEDTalk you’ll ever see …
How mushrooms can clean up radioactive contamination
Many people have written me and asked more or less the same question: “What would you do to help heal the Japanese landscape around the failing nuclear reactors?”
The nuclear fallout will make continued human habitation in close proximity to the reactors untenable. The earthquake and tsunami created enormous debris fields near the nuclear reactors. Since much of this debris is wood, and many fungi useful in mycoremediation are wood decomposers and build the foundation of forest ecosystems,
Read more here: http://www.permaculture.co.uk/articles/how-mushrooms-can-clean-radioactive-contamination-8-step-plan
Mushrooms can grow plastic
Watch this TED talk video. As Bayer shows in his talk, mycelium (basically mushroom roots) can be grown in molds to create completely compostable packaging products.
Mushrooms can EAT plastic
“This week we’re talking about fungus two ways. One that can survive exclusively on polyurethane and another that can replace polystyrene foam.
Both polyurethane and polystyrene foam are not biodegradable, so without a solution, all the plastic bottles and old toys we throw out every year will be sitting in landfills for centuries.
Yes, you can recycle plastic, but that just means turning it into another product and recycling hasn’t sufficiently slowed the production of new plastic.”… Until now!!
Click on this link to watch full report: http://news.yahoo.com/blogs/this-could-be-big-abc-news/more-mere-magic-mushrooms-154207424.html