It's pretty bad for the environment on the front end as its production releases a whole bunch of carbon dioxide into the air, and it's not great on the back end because large swaths of pavement deny water's opportunities to get back into the ground, increasing runoff that is frequently polluted.
I've posted about mycelium materials before, but I particularly like this video's combination of a bit of pro-forest coverage and the fact that the reporter made her own 'mushroom' brick.
To quote my mother anytime we my dad would order pizza with pepperoni and mushrooms, "if God had meant for us to eat fungus, he wouldn't have made it grow on our feet."
I've since moved on from sharing my dad's exact pizza order to one of bacon and banana peppers, but I'm still down with the button mushroom.
But this video certainly isn't about your dad's mushrooms any more than quorn or Ecovative (mentioned in the above video and already blogged about) are.
Today's video looks at a lab exploring the growth of fungus (mycelium) to produce all sorts of different, polymer-substitute materials.
Here's a related TED talk from Erik Klarenbeek (the focus of the middle of the above video).
From the ChemArts webpage, "[t]he CHEMARTS Cookbook offers both simple and more advanced ideas and recipes for hands-on experiments with wood-based materials. The book showcases interesting results, focusing on raw materials that are processed either chemically or mechanically from trees or other plants: cellulose fibres, micro- or nano-structured fibrils, cellulose derivatives, lignin, bark, and wood extractives."
ChemArts is a program at Aalto University in Finland pairing chemical engineering and art and design students to explore innovative uses for Finnish plant life (their words, from the video just below).
The program has published a 'cookbook' of sorts in which they provide recipes for 'cellulosic material exploration'. In other words, they have a bunch of recipes using cellulose derivatives from minimally processed materials like wood pulp to more processed ingredients like nanofibrillar cellulose, carboxymethyl cellulose, and microcrystalline cellulose along with fairly non-toxic materials like baking soda, calcium carbonate, glycerol, and starch.
The 'cookbook' is broken down with some basic science and ingredient background, methods and safety discussion, then the recipes themselves. The recipes are further classified as hard, soft, transparent, flexible, (3d) printed materials, colouring and dyeing, long fibres from nature, papermaking, and growing materials. The book then ends with some 'inspiration' projects that their students have made from the recipes in the book.
Some of the materials are going to require a bit of sourcing to manage, but the fact that they've published a recipe book for material science exploring sustainable, tree-based raw materials is spectacular.
The cookbook itself is available for €30.00 or as a free download pdf. You can check out some of the images from inside the 'cookbook' on this article (or they're all in the pdf.)
And, in case they make the free download disappear, I've uploaded the pdf to my Google Drive.
Ecovative uses mycelium (mushroom “roots”) to bond together agricultural byproducts like corn stalks into a material that can replace plastic foam. We’ve been selling it for a few years as protective packaging, helping big companies replace thousands of Styrofoam (EPS), and other plastic foam packaging parts. We’re now working to develop new products for building materials.
Here’s how it works. Mushroom Insulation grows into wood forms over the course of a few days, forming an airtight seal. It dries over the next month (kind of like how concrete cures) and you are left with an airtight wall that is extremely strong. Best yet, it saves on material costs, as you don’t need any studs in the wall, and it gives you great thermal performance since it’s one continuous insulated wall assembly. The finished Mushroom® Insulation is also fire resistant and very environmentally friendly.
In all honesty, that's a pretty exciting swap - fiberglass insulation or styrofoam packaging material for mycelium. That's going to be a heck of a lot easier to dispose of at the end of the material's life.
This is the part that excites me most for a material science classroom. They offer grow-it-yourself kits to make the ecovative material at home.
The giy.ecovative.com link doesn't work anymore. Instead, try theselinks.
Yes, but what if somebody comes at your house with a pizza oven and some pepperoni?
Well, not exactly mushrooms...more like something called mycelium which is certainly mushroom-adjacent. It's certainly a fungus-based product.
And apparently if you grow it just right, let it grow into the right shape, bake it to make sure the final product doesn't grow mushrooms in the process of shipping, you can use mycelium - as produced by a company called Ecovative - to protect your widgets during shipping.
And Ikea ships a whole lot of stuff across the oceans. They're not quite ready to ship entirely in fungus-based packaging, but they're looking into it.
