According to Electrek, it takes asphalt roof shingles about three centuries to fully break down and annually, 11 to 13 million tons of these materials are being disposed off just in the US.

Four companies, including real estate and investment group Lendlease and recycling digital marketplace Rubicon, have been developing a system that might help with how this type of waste is managed.

Sara Neff, head of sustainability at Lendlease Americas, said that "every asphalt shingle from those 214 homes would have gone to a landfill. There was simply no viable use for them."

"After teaming up with Rubicon, Mycocycle, and Rockwood Sustainable Solutions, we came up with an innovative idea using mycoremediation technology – combining mushrooms and shingles to break down waste materials and create a new byproduct that could ideally be reintroduced for reuse, furthering a circular economy", she added.

The team of researchers started testing out asphalt-based shingles with different mushrooms to see which fungi is the best at decomposing the material.

Bioremediation implies that mushrooms can break down the asphalt into small pieces much quicker than it would be able to in a natural environment, allowing other organisms to further process the material.

"We’re still in a trial phase, but we believe that this creative solution to avoiding landfill waste has the potential to transform not only how we handle waste on our own projects but also domestic manufacturing industries that could use this byproduct as an input", Sara Neff added.

Now, the team is looking at how it could implement bioremediation in processing other types of waste streams.