Engineering Design Turns Mushrooms into Foam
What if you could replace all the Styrofoam-- to-go containers, or those big pieces that hold a new computer, or Styrofoam peanuts that you use in packing? What if you could replace all of that with something that biodegrades and doesn't use petroleum in the manufacturing process?
Well, that's exactly what the founders of Ecovative Design are trying to do with mushrooms. Gavin McIntyre is co-founder and Chief Science Officer for Ecovative. And he joins us from the studios of AMC in Albany, New York. So Gavin, what inspired this idea?
GAVIN MCINTYRE: A simple walk in the woods, actually, by the company's other founder, Eben Bayer. Eben grew up on a maple syrup farm, so spending time in the woods was not something unique. What he noticed was some fungal mycelium, which is tissue of a mushroom, growing on and binding wood chips together. And the real inspiration and aha moment came from, how can we translate this natural process, this adhesion that occurs in Nature, to an industrial setting, and turn this natural tissue into a living glue?
INTERVIEWER: What was the first step that you and Eben took to figure out if you could even grow things in a controlled manner?
GAVIN MCINTYRE: This technology really got started while Eben and I were both undergraduates atRensselaer Polytechnic Institute. We just went online. We looked up some gourmet mushroom cultivation kits. And we brought them in a house, mixed them with some really low-density materials, and we fabricated our own tools so we could grow these products into shapes.
These first materials were mixed in our kitchens. We didn't have a clean room to start off in. And they were actually incubated under our beds, and in our closets. Because, as you might be aware,mushrooms really like dark places.
INTERVIEWER: All the greatest science is done in kitchens and at home in closets, I think. Was the first attempt, or those first attempts, successful?
GAVIN MCINTYRE: Surprisingly, they were. But when we first launched the company and, and started to repeat our process over and over again in different spaces, that's where we ran into a lot of difficulties. We were very lucky and fortunate to have a great mycologist, Sue Vanhook, who's, a mushroom biologist, join our team and really help educate us on the biological aspects of this process.
INTERVIEWER: OK, so let's talk a little bit more about the biology, in particular, because it's not the whole mushroom. It's not the whole fungus that you're using. You're using a very particular part of it called mycelium.
Mycelium is a key building block in this thing that we know as a mushroom, right?
GAVIN MCINTYRE: Exactly, mycelium is truly the supporting structure of all fungi, from mould mushroom species. The mushroom basically derives all of its energy, its nutrients, through this network known as mycelium. And then the mushroom itself is comprised of mycelium.
What's interesting is the mycelium differentiates, and forms mushrooms or the vegetative root-type structure that grows on lawns and in trees, for example, just by the environment in which is growing in. So based on the temperature, the CO2 levels, and even light, the mushroom will form or it'll just generate more of that vegetative mycelium.
INTERVIEWER: So that's what makes it so flexible. Essentially, it's a polymer. It's Nature's original analogy to what we see in plastics all around us today. Is it going too far to say that?
GAVIN MCINTYRE: That's true. In terms of its macroscopic level, what we can see with the naked eye, the mycelium really is that polymer construct. But if you look even closer at the molecular level, what you'll see is the mycelium-- in terms of its cell wall-- is comprised of chitin.
This is the same biopolymer that you'll find in lobster and crab shells. So it's very robust. It's water-insoluble, and it's highly cross-linked, which makes it very strong and great for industrial applications.
INTERVIEWER: So how exactly do you grow it? The mycelium needs some kind of substrate, right, or framework in which to grow. What materials do you use for that?
GAVIN MCINTYRE: We go to local farms. We take things like corn stalk, or seed husks and seed hulls-- byproducts of the agriculture industry. We mix them together with the tissue culture of fungal mycelium.
And over a period of three to five days the mycelium will grow and start to bind these materials together. The beauty of this process is that there's no additional embodied energy. All the energy for growth comes directly from the agricultural waste. So it's really a set-and-forget process. We put it on the shelf, and we come back to it three days later, and we have a finished product.
INTERVIEWER: Can you make it into any shape?
GAVIN MCINTYRE: We have been able to make in any shape, from very customized and complex geometries for protective packaging-- replacing those end-caps and things you might get around a computer-- to even large-scale panels for the construction industry. And today we're actually growing a house.
INTERVIEWER: You're growing a house, you re--, an actual house?
GAVIN MCINTYRE: We are indeed. So we've constructed some walls. We're growing some mycelium between those walls, and we're even providing the house with acoustical tiles since all of our materials are class A firewalls. You can hit them with a blow torch. It just won't burn.
INTERVIEWER: Well Gavin McIntyre is chief scientist at Ecovative Design. They're using mycelium found in Nature in mushrooms to create all manner of new packing and construction material.Gavin McIntyre, thanks so much.
GAVIN MCINTYRE: Yeah, thanks for having me. I appreciate the opportunity.
