500words

Fungi Fungi is a strange collective term for a variety of things – both nice and nasty. The nice ones are edible mushrooms and truffles; yeasts that provide rising agents for bread, beer, yoghurt, kimchi and kombucha and mould in blue cheese. The not so nice things are fungal toe disease, mould on things that aren’t blue cheese, and poisonous mushrooms. Fungi are also the basis for tofu – this can be nice or nasty depending on your taste. Medicines are developed from fungi, including antibiotics such as penicillin – which is quite useful. All types of fungi are members of a group of eukaryotic organisms – amazingly these are considered to be a kingdom (in today’s society this could be considered to be a term that may cause offence, being one which may indicate a male domination of things) and are neither plant, nor animal. Interestingly the word ‘fungus’, used in the singular, has also been adopted by a bogeyman -neither animal nor plant. There are currently 120,000 id...

  Fungi: The answer to our packaging problems? The continual global rise in population density has led to a significant increase in the demand for materials. Construction and packaging industries are under great pressure to keep up with the needs of the population and, as a global society, we have adapted an unsustainable reliance on petroleum-based materials. These materials are synthetically created, requiring significant amounts of energy for manufacture and are responsible for the release of large quantities of carbon dioxide into the atmosphere. Expanded polystyrene (EPS) foam is one example of such synthetic materials. It is relatively inexpensive to manufacture and is lightweight and rigid, causing it to be widely consumed on a global scale, particularly for use in insulation and protective packaging. However, despite its desirable properties, the non-biodegradable nature of EPS foam means that it can remain in landfill for over 500 years before decomposing. In addition ...