Bioremediation

Regenerative Culture Health, Healing & Movement
#1

Obviously, there’s a pretty wide variety of environmental hazards. Soil, water & air have all been polluted, and that obviously gets passed on to the food we eat, be it dandelions, fish, deer, etc.

I have a decent understanding of how to increase soil fertility, but I’m running into a bit of a wall trying to figure out how to deal with lead, mercury, and assorted dioxins.

TonyZ, I think you hinted at methods of dealing with damaged habitats, is there anything you could share? Anyone else…?

*Not sure if this is the right place for this, so feel free to move it.

#2

here’s a company that’s doing it. Nature Works

though, i always wonder what they do with the plants that soak up these pollutants. seems like if you leave them on-site, they’ll just die, decompose and return the toxins back to the soil. do you haul them off to a land fill and pollute that soil?

i’ve wondered about this a lot. i think if we–as the potential survivors of the collapse of civilization–can figure out how to do some of this, we can start rejuvenating at least the little pockets of the world we’re inhabiting.
i think bioremediation is going to be an important skill that we’ll need to keep pass on down to our children. sure, they’ll need to learn to hunt and forage and make tools and shelters and clothes and shit. but if they can also know how to clean up the civ’s left over shit piles, then there will be a lot more foraging and hunting to be had–and it will all be a lot safer without the fear of toxins.

ps: i think the Dangers/Risks section might be a good place for this thread.

#3

I’ve heard that a lot of fungi will filter toxins out of soil, even things such as diesel fuel.

#4

That is correct, lonnie.

Paul Stamets, fungiperfecti.com , did an experiment where he planted oysters mushrooms on a pile of soil contaminated with deisel fuel. There were 5 other piles that they tried various other strategies. 6 months later, Stamets’ pile was the only “clean” one, and had plants growing off of it.

Fungi has some seriously amazing properties. Antoher example is that if you mycelate your mulch, in your garden, you improve your yeild by 30-50%.

Rix, i hope to pass that knowledge along to my kids and my tribe for that very reason. The good thing is that we don’t have to figure out the baby steps, it has be done before.

R

#5

I’ve wondered that myself about what to do once the heavy metals are in the plants Rix. Back when I was a sustainabilicrat I worked at this place that does natural wastewater treatment systems: http://www.oceanarks.org/. I never thought to ask back then. They always were pointing out how awesome it would be to grow food from wastewater, but in reality it was not possible for that very reason. Cities can’t (or don’t) control what goes into the sewer system.

#6

that’s awesome about the fungi eating the diesel spill.

you’re right, rory. the ground work (didn’t intend that pun) has already been done. i’d love to learn at least the basics. but i don’t want to have to get a masters in ecobiology to do it.

on some further reading at the Nature Works website, i found that they sometimes incinerate the plants to concentrate the toxins. which still begs the question: “what do you do with that shit?”

if we start to remediate our local regions, do we just choose to take the “infected” plants and dump them somewhere “safe” where they won’t re-leach their toxins back into the community we’re eating from? all of this stuff came from the earth to begin with, but we had to dig deep in the ground to find it. is our best bet to find a mine shaft and drop the polluted oyster mushrooms and cattail rhizomes down there?

anybody know of any remedial remediation courses? lol.

#7

Well, I could recommend a couple of books for you Rix.

Permaculture: A Design Manual by Bill Mollison. pricey at 75.00USD but pretty awesome. NOt so much a remediation guide, but a good solid ground work to build off of. for something along those lines but cheaper, Toby Hemenway’s Gaia’s Garden is a pretty good primer.

Mycelium Running by Paul Stamets. again a bit pricey at 35.00 USD,but that’s where I got the diesel/oyster example.

I know Stamets has some bioremediation courses in Oregon, where he lives. Fairly pricey, about $800 a course. You also have to buy his books, another 125USD. get his catalog from his website, has alot of good remediation books.

#8

thanks for the tips, rory. i’m definitely not in a place where i can shell that kind of cash out right now. but it’s good to know that the information is out there.

#9

Reviving an old topic here. The nice thing about fungi is they actually break all kinds of hydrocarbon chains, depending on which species you are using. They will literally digest polluting hydrocarbon molecules into simpler forms. Those oyster mushrooms cited above were totally clean of pollution, and totally edible.

Now where heavy metals are involved, its a totally different game. They are elements and will never be destroyed by chemical processes. They can only be removed.

#10

And those are what bother me the most. Particularly mercury.

#11

Yeah, whenever I find myself getting worked up into a tizzy over this, I just remind myself, that it’s not like wild food is going to have that much more pollutants than domestic food (and generally less). But still…

#12
Now where heavy metals are involved, its a totally different game. They are elements and will never be destroyed by chemical processes.

Some mushrooms will also remove heavy metals from the ground. You are right though, they only collect and store it, rather than “destroy” it.

#13

store it thermometers!

The fruitbodies of oyster mushrooms sequester mecury at 1000 times the background level. You can then dry the fruitbodies, incinerate their plant mass, and then RECYCLE the metals!!! how cool is that!

There is a fungi that sequesters radioactive cesium at 10,000 times the background level!!!

In Stamet’s “Mycelium Running” there is a table that lists the fungi and their sequestering capabilities. Obviously, knowing this, you can use it to avoid picking toxic mushrooms for food, as well (if you know the known contaminant in the area of foraging).

Also, spent substrate from food production of mushrooms are an excellent primary succession catalyst for areas struggling to get the processes of life moving.

I recently proposed a vision for food security and health security and posted it on Ishthink: www.ishthink.org/a_valley_vision

#14

I suppose that since all these heavy metals used to be deep in the earth, that may be the best place to put the regained contaminants. Concentrate, Remove, and Bury. Perhaps a good use for old mine shafts, to return the metals we got from them back to whence they came.

#15

what about the groundwater? I don’t think you can put the genie back in the bottles; have you asked the metals what they would like to do?

#16

Putting the genie back in the bottle is hard, but not impossible. For generations we’ll have to filter everything, but as we filter it, we gather it. and then we can store it. Perhaps we can even make use of it. Maybe a day comes when we filter toxins out of water and then work them into useful, inert forms. “store it in a thermometer”

#17

You know, I had never thought to ask such a question until I posted it, and I have pondered it for a while. I couldn’t help but think of the same element that maintains our gravity and place on this earth, Iron, is the same element that helps oxygen do the blood dance in we creatures. I realized metal is already alive and still looking for new ways to be. I had a vision where metal was as spiritually malleable as physically malleable. Metal right now does have a negative embodiment. It’s because of all the anger we have used the metal with.

I believe a ritual is in order for everyone to cleanse their metal and re-embody it with ‘good intentions’.

…

SO this morning, I woke up early, couldn’t sleep, and at first light I rode down to the river. Despite the blue paint chips streaming by in the effluent, I felt liek a lot of life was managing the heavy pollution the Wabash faces. I’ve lived on the wabash in two different places, once here nine blocks away, and once two years ago south of Fort Wayne, In, where I could see the river from my living room window. The ducks and the smallmouth bass were both feeding, adn some duck took a liking to showing off their landing technique… I saw a baby water moccasin and a crane. I saw trees towering their green band of reflection into the water. One thing was missing from the scene. Grasses. The banks all along the Terre Haute waterfront were a brown strip as far as the eye could see, with no grasses to provide cover, nutrients, and filtering capacity.

I was dreaming up some kind of ‘river sod’ that could be produced and laid out on these miles and miles of brown strips where grasses once fed the myriad of life…

#18

I love to hear you talk about the Wabash, Tony. I had a really beautiful experience with the Wabash once, on my way to a friend’s house in Evansville.

We were driving across the bridge (I’m not sure where, maybe Terra Haute or Vincennes – god, it’s been so long ago) and saw some folks whose car had stalled on the bridge.

The friend driving let me and the other friend (whose house we were going to) out so he could go to the end of the bridge and pay the toll, and we could run back and check on the stalled car.

Night had fallen a long time before. The full moon had risen several hands into the sky. The waters of the Wabash below me had swollen from recent rains and spread out into the woods on either side. And the surging current of the river reflected the rippling beams of the moon back on my face.

I barely remember what happened with the stalled car. I think my friend and I helped them push it to the end of the bridge. All I really remember that night is running across that bridge with the light of the moon and the sound of the water reverberating in my senses.

#19

Sometimes I buy the story that worked iron (and by extension, steel) keeps the spirits at bay. I wonder how that works with Tony’s living metal hypothesis.

And if anyone wasn’t aware of this, all kinds of things are evolving to live off our byproducts. http://www.nmsr.org/nylon.htm

#20

woah, nylon eaters!

I just hope they don’t outbreed carbohydrate eaters. Nylon will only ever exist as a limited resource, so once the nylon eaters have done their duty, they will either have to die out or mutate again.