133 Overseas, this peculiarity has not gone unnoticed: Funga (www.funga.earth), an environmental services company from Austin, Texas, has in fact decided to launch projects to remove carbon dioxide through the use of soil micro-organisms, and has in short time secured funding of around four million dollars from investment and venture capital funds. In addition to their function of aiding soil carbon storage, fungi are also proving to have another capacity: restoring contaminated soils, disaggregating toxic substances and avoiding disposal problems. A peculiarity that is by no means marginal, if we think that in Italy alone – as calculates the ISPRA, Italian government agency for environmental protection and research – there are over twelve thousand contaminated sites. These are territorial areas at high risk, where the insistence of human activities has over time caused such an alteration of the environmental qualitative characteristics of the soil, subsoil and water as to pose a danger to human health. Experiments by several universities around the world are focusing on petroleum and heavy metal pollution. Fungi, grown on polluted soils, have been shown to be able to feed on the organic compounds, breaking down crude petroleum contaminants and eliminating their toxicity. In soils contaminated by heavy metals such as mercury, the fungi instead absorb the harmful substances: they become toxic, but the soil becomes clean again. At that point, in short, disposal only concerns fungi, thus saving landfill space. «Fungi are the most powerful decomposers in nature», researchers from the British Royal Geographical Society pointed out a couple of years ago. «For millions of years they have evolved to exploit the residues of other species, recycling nutrients back into the ecosystem. The only organisms on earth capable of decomposing wood, they are also able to extend into the soil with their filamentous mycelia, excreting digestive enzymes that allow them to biodegrade complex materials». In a word: mycorrhization. One of the many ways in which nature is turning to us its other cheek. Re Soil Foundation is a private non-profit organisation. Its creation is linked to the need to promote scientific research, technology transfer, training and dissemination on one of the most important, but increasingly degraded, assets on the planet: soil. Emanuele Isonio is responsible for journalistic content at the Re Soil Foundation. In 2012 he was awarded as best Young Journalist by the European Commission’s Agriculture Directorate. www.resoilfoundation.org
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