06/19/2026
Mushrooms can do such cool things! 🍄🟫✨🍄
The University of British Columbia (UBC) just built a public toilet that runs entirely on mushrooms.
The MycoToilet, developed at UBC's Botanical Garden, uses living mycelium to break down human waste with no water, no chemicals, and no sewage connection.
Fungi produce enzymes that dismantle waste into simpler compounds while feeding the microbial communities that finish the job, cutting pathogen breakdown time roughly in half versus standard composting toilets and capturing over 90% of odour-causing compounds.
It's a potential game-changer as 2.3 billion people lack adequate sanitation, and the existing options (costly sewage infrastructure, chemical toilets, unreliable composting units) have never closed that gap.
This system needs just four maintenance visits a year and produces ~600L of compost plus 2,000L of liquid fertiliser annually, nutrients that can go straight back into soil.
A cedar shelter, a skylight, a wheelchair ramp, and fungi doing what they've done for hundreds of millions of years.
