No, not that kind...
or the fun kind.
It's like a science torture device?
Right now, it's testing the strength of this material
that looks like leather
but is actually...
The thin fibers that feed fungi.
If you look hard enough in the woods or my refrigerator,
you'll find plenty.
- For an analogy,
you might think about the roots and stem of a plant.
In this case, the fruit would be the mushrooms.
And Mycelium is the vast network
that supports that organism.
- The way mycelium grows, with fibers
that intersect and connect and then bond,
is almost like watching fabric weave itself together.
It does naturally what we've spent millennia
teaching machines to do.
Why do this?
- Cowhides are some sort of byproduct or coproduct
of the beef and dairy industries.
And sustainability is a major factor in all of that.
- The cattle industry is one of the largest
polluters in the world in terms of greenhouse gases,
as well as water pollution.
And sustainability aside, it's time for a new material
that can take us into the future.
- Fine Mycelium really represents
just a complete paradigm shift
in the way that we're going to think about materials
for industries that have been very fixed
for a very, very long time.
- This is Hard Reset,
a series about rebuilding our world from scratch.
That's Sophia Wang,
fine artist and co-founder of MycoWorks.
- People love leather for so many reasons.
- Because it's cool.
- 'Ross is wearing leather pants.'
- There's the history and specificity of leather,
having come from an animal, so it is the trace of life.
- Yes. And cool, and totally rad, and awesome.
- And then there's also the amazing way
that it performs where, over time,
it achieves this beautiful patina and it molds to form.
It becomes very personal.
- Yes, we agree, it's cool.
Anyway, the question is how do you recreate that
with something that is decidedly not a dead cow?
- Fine Mycelium begins with a process
that's actually quite familiar,
if you think about the
agricultural production of mushrooms.
- Mycelium is grown in trays,
and these trays could be any size.
So they could theoretically make sheets of Mycelium
that are 20 feet across without any seams or breaks.
Leather just can't do that.
- Our closed tray system enables total control
over the growth environment.
We are able to optimize each sheet of Fine Mycelium
as it grows.
- For their costumers, say, a clothing company
that needs to make tens of thousands of jackets,
that mycelium can be grown to exact specifications:
thickness, softness, color, pliability.
That's where this lab comes in.
- So one of the tests that we actually perform
is tensile testing, and it's holding a material apart
until it breaks.
This is a Bally Flex machine.
We put samples on here and run them up to 100,000 cycles
to make sure that the flexibility is there,
and that we can make a product that's gonna to last.
This machine right here is a quantitative machine
that can tell us how soft leather is.
- Even if you are producing it in mass quantities,
there's still the uniqueness of each natural manifestation.
Mycelium is a living, natural fiber;
has its own signature grain, and performance,
and hand feel.
- We've been able to push this process forward
in a way that's more like a biotech
or a more traditional manufacturing process
that's tightly controlled.
We have some trays that are running material
for, say, handbags;
other materials that are being built for shoes.
And so within a plant, we can very easily customize
what's going on in each tray,
based on the orders that we received from our customers.
- The masked man here is Matt,
the CEO of MycoWorks, not the lone ranger.
- Let's leave it at that.
We're actually creating new types of properties
and things that might look familiar at first,
such as a collection of mycelial cells,
but manipulating those cells into a new structure.
Things such as enhanced durability, incredible softness,
you know, the ability to add chemistry, like dyes,
to turn it into something that is familiar to us, like leather,
but really is so much more.
- It's tempting to think of this
as something to replace leather.
That's the closest thing we already have
in terms of look, and feel, and function.
But this is really something much different.
- We look at the incredible growth of the luxury
and fashion industries over the past 20 or 30 years,
and in turn, the huge growth in the supply of leather
for all of the fast fashion, all of the cars,
all of the things that use leather now.
And we see that what's occurred in the industry
is that leather has moved more and more towards plastics.
And the reason is really simple.
- Leather production is-
- the byproduct or coproduct
of the beef and dairy industries.
It's a supply chain that doesn't scale.
The fashion industry can't just say,
“Hey, I'm going to turn up a knob this year.
We need more leather,
so we're gonna go find more leather.”
- So, it's an industry that is not positioned
for scale.
- But mycelium is a material whose qualities
can be highly controlled and grown in limitless quantities.
It can also be grown in multiple dimensions,
not just flat sheets.
It might feel like leather,
but it's as adaptable as plastic.
And that adaptability was part of the idea from the start.
Just look at the work of artist Phil Ross,
one of the co-founders of MycoWorks,
who pioneered the use of fungus as a material.
- Phil Ross is a San Francisco-based artist
who has worked with natural and living materials
for over three decades.
He was growing sculptures and art objects
and architectural structures out of mycelium,
and exhibiting them around the world.
- Phil Ross's work isn't just about
using mycelium to replace a building material,
it's about rethinking materials from the ground up-
um,*
literally, because mushrooms grow in the ground.
- Phil's work, I would say, is foundational
to our current understanding of what mycelium can do,
and we're really just scratching the surface.
- What's important here is to expand
the way we think about the very concept of materials.
How do we make the stuff that goes onto our bodies
or into our structures?
For example, imagine when we travel to Mars
and build a sustainable colony.
We're not going to take cows, at least not for a while.
And we're not going to have access to petroleum or cotton
or wool the same way we would here on Earth.
But we'd still need flexible materials that could be
ultra strong or ultra soft and reusable,
so we wouldn't have to grow from scratch every time.
A material like this, that can be soft or rigid
and can be grown from our waste products
and turned back into compost for soil,
might be a crucial part of living sustainably
on a place like Mars.
And even though most of us
aren't going to Mars anytime soon,
the same types of constraints are quickly becoming
the reality for us on this planet as well.
- I don't think leather's going away,
and I don't think plastic's going away.
I think that eventually those materials are gonna run
into even bigger constraints.
Even bigger walls than they are today.
Material like Fine Mycelium is going to be able
to pick up that slack.
- New materials, new possibilities,
new paradigms for working with nature.
This is the promise of biotechnology and why
Fine Mycelium, as a practice and a system
and a way of growing the future of materials,
is so exciting.
It feels like the sky's the limit.
- Come back next time for another episode
of Hard Reset.
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