The City of Medicine Hat's landfill is shown from the Southeast Hill looking east. - NEWS FILE PHOTO
A research project at Medicine Hat College is taking a creative, but natural approach to removing heavy metals from soil in the city’s landfill.
The project – which operates in partnership between its Centre for Innovation and the City of Medicine Hat – is using fungal mycelium to break down heavy metals in large quantities of unusable compost.
“Fungal mycelium, or fungal threads which live in places where they can decompose, secrete enzymes which may help to break down any exceedances of heavy metals in the soil,” reads a release from MHC.
The process would allow the compost to be used in things such as agriculture or oil and gas.
“The whole role of fungi is to make soil to house life so that they have something to consume,” first-year student and research assistant Abigail McBride says in the release. “It’s advantageous for them to be able to degrade or absorb contaminants so that they can continue to have more vegetation to eat. It is really cool, the processes that go into it.
“Using these natural processes reduces the need to introduce chemicals. It’s more efficient and usually less expensive. Once you have mushrooms being produced, they’ll continue to spore and you’ll have a continual renewal of this resource that’s essential to the process.”
The project is now awaiting the arrival of mycelian samples, which will allow researchers to begin testing at MHC.
“If the fungal mycelia proves to remediate the compost, they will consider pelletizing the compost to be sold as a soil amendment.”
