The stormwater swales on a former landfill site owned by the Dharma Rain Zen Center are teeming with fungi.

Mushrooms sprouting from the planters designed to catch runoff as it flows off the Siskiyou Square site in Portland, near the intersection of Northeast 85th Avenue and Siskiyou Street, are no accident. Members of the Buddhist organization planted them to test the theories of mycoremediation. The technique uses fungi to filter pollutants commonly found in urban stormwater runoff, such as heavy metals and poly-aromatic hydrocarbons from vehicle fuel as well as E. coli and other bacteria.

The way fungi survive and propagate is ideally suited to filtering and breaking down contaminants, said Jordan Weiss, a Portland-based mycoremediation consultant. Mushrooms naturally release acids and enzymes that can break down toxins, he said. Planting fungi on a brownfield site has the added benefit of rejuvenating soil, Weiss added, fostering the return of native plants and wildlife.

“Once the fungus colonizes the soil, it unlocks valuable soil nutrients that kick-starts the soil-building mechanisms,” he said.

For the past two years, Weiss has contributed to the Dharma Rain Zen Center’s campaign to clean up and develop a nearly 14-acre portion of Siskiyou Square. He is leading efforts to plant mushrooms in a stormwater management system installed on the brownfield site, which once served as a rock quarry and construction waste landfill.

Although mycoremediation has been around for a number of years and was pioneered in the Pacific Northwest by Paul Stamets, an Olympia, Wash.-based mycologist, author and founder of mushroom cultivator business Fungi Perfecti, it hasn’t taken off in the Portland-metro area, Weiss said. But interest is starting to grow and he’s hoping to soon test the runoff passing through the planters on the Zen center property to confirm that the mushrooms are indeed filtering the stormwater.

“Mycoremediation, even though it’s been proven in a handful of research and demonstration projects, (is) still not widely accepted,” Weiss said. “It’s not common knowledge. It’s still kind of locked up in the mushroom books.”

In Washington County, Clean Water Services is tackling its own mycoremediation experiment. The water resources management utility for the Tualatin River watershed is partnering with Fungi Perfecti and Pacific University in Forest Grove on a pilot project to use fungi to filter out hydrocarbons from motor fuel found in street sweeper debris collected from throughout the county.

The 90-day pilot was launched last month. If tests later this summer prove that the technique is working, the agency could use mushrooms to decontaminate the mulch-like debris, making it safe for use as erosion control or a soil amenity, said Jared Kinnear, recycled water program manager with Clean Water Services. Currently, Clean Water Services pays to dispose of the leaves and other natural debris collected by street sweepers at a landfill that specializes in toxic materials, he said.

Mycoremediation appealed to the Dharma Rain Zen Center because the organization would like its brownfield cleanup effort to serve as a demonstration project, said Kakumyo Lowe-Charde, a priest and the center’s development director.

“We’re very interested in a pretty holistic scheme of going about this,” he said. “One of our goals is lessons learned are useful to other projects … The mycoremediation seems like a real winner there. We’d like to have some hard data that can help build our case.”

Since purchasing the property in 2012, the center has embarked on a series of environmental remediation efforts and completed the shell of a Zen temple and meditation hall. Plans for the site also call for constructing a preschool and restoring the surrounding natural area into a native oak savanna. Construction of a 31-unit co-housing complex on the site is scheduled to begin this fall, Lowe-Charde said.

The work has attracted the attention of the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency, which recently awarded the center a $200,000 grant to help cover cleanup costs.

Mary Vogel, principal of Portland-based sustainable urban design and planning firm PlanGreen, has long had an interest in mycoremediation and was happy to hear that it’s being incorporated in the Zen center brownfield cleanup. She’s hopeful that the technique will finally start to take off in the Portland-metro area.

“I’ve been waiting 30 years for mycoremediation to take hold in this community,” Vogel said. “It seemed like a no-brainer … We’re one of the leaders in stormwater (and) bioremediation, but we’re not using mushrooms.”

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For years, Siskiyou Square, a 27-acre site at Northeast 82nd Avenue and Siskiyou Street, has languished as one of the largest undeveloped land parcels in Portland.

Developers resisted its potential because parts of the former landfill site are seismically unstable, and a methane distribution pipeline lies underground. In 2006, a Canadian real estate firm proposed to build a big-box store, but residents thwarted the bid when they discovered it might be a Walmart.

But the , a Soto Zen Buddhist organization running out of space in Southeast Portland, is looking to build a new facility on 13 acres of the square. Members of the organization said a proposed light footprint would suit the site and that the development would be better than a larger one because water runoff and trees could be preserved.

“It’s not a simple piece of land to work with, but we are thrilled to find it,” said Sallie Jiko Tisdale, a teacher at the center and a member of its development committee. “Buddhists believe how they live today affects tomorrow, so we practice a kind of carefulness of how we behave. In that, how we build and how we live on that land is going to be a direct religious expression.”

Preliminary designs for the project, which will go before the during a pre-application conference early next month, show that the new facility would include a temple, a large vegetable garden, a playground for children and multiple residential units. All of the single-level buildings would be composed of wood.

Kakumyo Lowe-Charde, the organization’s development director, said the buildings could be constructed more easily and for less money than larger ones because of small foundations.

“The bigger the building, the more expensive the foundation is necessary to hold it in place as the land settles around it,” Lowe-Charde said. “We are going to have really light buildings, and we can do a much simpler foundation that adapts to the landfill that doesn’t necessitate putting 80-foot piles through the solid rock below.”

To meet environmental quality standards, gas barriers would be installed below the buildings to prevent methane from reaching interiors. Additionally, perforated horizontal pipes would be placed beneath the buildings to ventilate accumulated gas and prevent gas pressures from elevating.

Seismic instability, however, is a real hindrance, Tisdale said.

“You can only do certain kinds of construction on the property and you can only put weight on certain parts of the property; it limits the kind of building that can be done,” she said. “People get scared from something like methane pumps, but if you know what you’re doing and go through 30 years of (U.S. Environmental Agency) reports like we are, everything should be green-lighted.”

Tisdale added that the organization would try to preserve the open green spaces of the square, which is near Rocky Butte.

“We really like the land as it is in its native state and space,” she said. “We believe we are not separated or disconnected from our environment or each other.”

The center has engaged in multiple meetings with neighborhood groups. The South Madison Neighborhood Association, which opposed the big-box store proposal in 2006, believes the project will be a positive contribution to the area.

“The vision they have would blend nicely with that piece of land,” said Dave Smith, the association’s chairman. “Putting in low buildings, plantings and walkways would be a more positive use than the proposed previous use for it.”

Both Tisdale and Lowe-Charde said the center’s existing facilities, on Southeast Madison Street between 25th and 26th avenues, are too small. They believe the proposed project would provide the appropriate amount of space for the center’s diverse set of programs – ranging from seminary training to children’s classes. The square also would provide space for residential units, so that the center’s members could live closely together.

“We have all this energy and we’ve been waiting for a space to put it in,” Lowe-Charde said. “This gives us room to continue growing and diversifying.”

If the $3 million to $4 million project were approved by the city, Lowe-Charde said it would be broken down into phases, with construction starting in summer 2014. He also believes more development would occur after its completion.

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