Treating industrial waste with fungi case studies

When it comes to industrial waste, most people picture hazardous sludge and remote sites contaminated by decades-old hydrocarbons. But what if fungi could help solve these challenges? At MycoMine, a clever team of environmental innovators is putting fungi to work across Sweden’s toughest sites—showing how nature’s recyclers turn notorious pollutants into stories of recovery and renewal.

Every project starts with a unique problem. Sometimes it is acidic refinery sludge, a foul blend of oil, sulfuric acid and water. Other times it is playground soil tainted by heavy metals or even materials leftover from engine production. There are even mines whose earth is saturated with hydrocarbons, relics of industrial history. Rather than treating these as unsolvable headaches, MycoMine asks: “What can a fungus do here?” That simple question plants the spore for radical change and pollution remediation. MycoMine works with everyone from national agencies to corporate companies, training fungi to convert industrial waste into non-toxic constituents, and in some cases into new materials which can be used again.