As gourmet mushrooms they are preeminent decomposers which could also be used for some types of waste management, mostly agricultural wastes. They thrive on most all hardwods, on wood by-products (sawdust, paper, pulp sludge, all the cereal straws, corn and corn cobs, on sugar cane bagasse, coffee residues (coffee grounds, hulls, stalks & leaves), banana fronds, cottonseed hulls, agave waste, soy
pulp and on other materials too numerous to mention and difficult to imagine possible. The mycelium has the unique ability to splitt the chemical structure of highly toxic PCB's (Polychloride Biphenylen) into non-toxic substances without enclosing toxics in their fruits, this way Oyster Mushrooms can be used to recultivate industrial ground contaminated by PCB's by using principles of biotechnologie. Pleurotus species can best serve to reduce hunger in developing nations, and to revitalize rural economies. Most extraordinary about Oyster Mushrooms is their conversion of substrate mass into mushrooms. Biological efficiences often exeed 100 %, some of the greatest, if not the greatest, in the world of cultivated mushrooms. In the course of decomposing dry sraw, nearly 50 % of the mass is liberated as gaseous carbon dioxine, 20% is lost as residual water, 20 % remains as "spent" compost, and 10 % is coonverted into dry mushrooms. This yield can be also expressed as a 25 % conversation of the wet mass of the substrate into fresh mushrooms. This formula is greatly affected by the stage at which the mushrooms are harvested.
