They don't "get rid" of heavy metals in any absolute sense, but they do remove them from the environment, concentrating the metals within the fruit bodies of th

They don't "get rid" of heavy metals in any absolute sense, but they do remove them from the environment, concentrating the metals within the fruit bodies of the fungus where they can be easily "harvested" and processed to either recover the metals or sequester them from the rest of the environment. Fungi are also spectacularly good at remediating hydrocarbon-polluted soils and related material - even deeply polluted sites that are normally just fenced off and "forgotten" as toxic-waste sites. Take a look at some of Paul Stamets's talks on your favourite Tube site.