This video is brought to you by Curiosity Stream.
Plastic changed the course of manufacturing forever, but a lot of that came at a cost
that's plaguing us now. About 91% of plastic isn’t recycled and we consume about 5 grams
of micro plastic waste in our food every week. But there's a possible solution: fungus. Yes,
fungus. Mycelium technology might be the next big boom ... like this mycelium brick ... a
plastic-like replacement with many uses and new opportunities for products … maybe even
wearable technology. Let's explore mycelium technology and how it can help us achieve
a more renewable and cleaner future ... and one where we don't end up eating so much plastic.
I'm Matt Ferrell … welcome to Undecided.
When we think about plastics, different types, shapes, colors and sizes, like soda bottles,
spring to mind. But, from a chemist's perspective, they're all are made of the same class of
materials: polymers. While Bakelite, which was the first synthetic plastic created from
organic compounds, was created in 1907, polymers weren't discovered until 1920 by Hermann Staudinger.
A polymer is a broad term that encompasses a substance with large molecules made up of
repeating subunits that are bonded together.
Just as it was for several other materials, World War II was a great impetus for the development
of plastic and chemical innovations, like Polyethylene, Polystyrene, and Nylon. It’s
kind of a dark side of innovation, but war can help accelerate things. Later in the 1950s,
plastics manufacturers started to make consumer products as an outlet for the materials they
developed in the war. To quote the movie “The Graduate,” “Just one word … Plastics.”
During that decade, manufacturers introduced polyester and polypropylene, one of the most
used polymers in the world.
Plastics have made our life a lot easier to store liquid and food, it costs much less
than other materials, it’s water and heat resistant, and durable. Sadly, the plastic
industry oversold it’s recyclability … it’s cheaper to make new than to recycle old. Combine
that with its excessive use and non-biodegradable nature and plastics have become one of the
most wide-spread, harmful substances around the world.
In America, 100 billion plastic bags are thrown away every year, not to mention all other
packaging materials made of plastics that are discarded. The problem is that they can
hang around in the environment for hundreds of years, and burning plastics releases toxic
chemicals that can harm plants and animals. But it turns out that we may have a robust,
sustainable alternative to replace plastic: Mycelium.
This organism is the underground, root-like body for fungi that produce mushrooms. So
if you compare it to a plant, mycelium is the root and the mushroom is the flower. The
mushrooms that we eat are only a small, visible part of a much larger organism.
Fungi are important in ecosystems due to their ability to recycle nutrients, allowing previously
locked away nutrients to become available to other organisms, like plants.
And they’re surprisingly robust and able to spread easily under the right conditions.
All it takes is a few spores to germinate. As it grows it releases enzymes to digest
the surroundings and absorb the nutrients. Eventually the cells begin to branch out and
continue to grow to build a vast mycelial network, and it’s only when it’s fully
built that mushrooms begin to grow. And this is where we can tap into its potential.
Rather than letting a mushroom pop up, humans can create forms around the mycelium as they
grow to build predictable structures by providing a framework. This is an example of mycelium
grown into a brick form. It’s not that different from using molds with inorganic materials
like metal or plastic. We’re just letting Mother Nature do the work. The production
process is kind of simple. It uses a mix of agricultural waste, which could be anything
from hemp to wood chips, and it’s bound with mycelium structures.
After that, we have the base material for most mycelium-based products, known as **the
foam**. This mixture is put in molds for whatever you’re trying to make, and placed in an
environment with controlled CO2, humidity levels, airflow, and temperature. It’s a
pretty quick process. Fibers can be found after just a few hours and a visible layer
after a day or two. Usually within a week the mycelium foam fills the mold. Overall,
it takes about a week.
Mycelium foam is a great insulator, resilient, safe, strong, and biodegradable, which opens
up the possibilities for a wide range of products, like packaging, clothing, construction, and
even food. Unlike plastics and other synthetic materials – which can take hundreds of years
to decompose - mycelium-based products naturally degrade after their intended product cycle.
A nice bonus, mycelium foam is inexpensive and cost-competitive with polystyrene foam.
Mycelium technology has spawned a lot of companies from several industries around the world.
The pioneer was Ecovative, which introduced mycelium technology in 2006. With more than
40 patents in 31 countries, most mycelium composites and materials out there are actually
made under their license.
Ecovative developed several branches of products. Its MycoFlex™ technology, for example, is
used to produce everything from lightweight insulating lofts for gloves to high-performance
foams in footwear. It's heat resistant, insulating, breathable, and strong.
In packaging materials, they've created a high-performing, cost-competitive solution
that provides thermal insulation, water resistance, and decomposes in the soil within 45 days.
It’s a great alternative for polystyrene. Even better, mushroom-based packaging uses
only 12% of the energy from plastic production and generates 90% less CO2 equivalents. Some
examples of companies licensing this technology are the Magical Mushroom Company is the U.K.,
Paradise Packaging Co in California, Grown.bio in the Netherlands, and BioFab in New Zealand.
And IKEA announced that they’re going to replace styrofoam packaging with MycoComposite
for all of its products. I wonder if they'll give it a name?
Ecovative has also spun out Atlast Food Co. which creates whole cut plant-based meats.
Unlike other plant-based meats, the products from Atlast have almost no processing. And
apologies to the vegetarians out there … this might be a little gross … but part of the
reason it works so well as a fake meat is because mycelium fibers grow together in a
tissue that resembles the fiber-like texture of muscle tissues in animals. Interesting
… if not a little gross.
So we’ve had packaging and food, but what about clothing? Bolt Threads is using their
Mylo™ technology as a sustainable alternative to leather that we’ll be seeing in the market
through their partners, which I’m sure you’re very familiar with, Adidas, Kering, Lululemon,
and Stella McCartney. By the way, Adidas has recently launched the Adidas’ Stan Smith
Mylo — the first shoe of its type to be made with a mushroom-based material. It was
used in the classic three stripes, heel tab overlay and signature branding that their
shoes are known for.
One question you may be asking yourself, I know I asked it when I was learning about
this stuff, is the fungus still alive and can it keep growing within the products? I
don’t think I’d want a pair of growing shoes. Although... that might save parents
a lot of money on if their kids shoes grew as fast as their feet. For most commercial
products, mycelium is heated long before it reaches the customer in order to kill it,
maintain the product's intended form and prevent growing mushrooms and spewing spores.
As if the trifecta of packaging, food, and clothing wasn’t enough … let’s step
up to a quadfecta.
But before getting to that, I'd like to thank today's sponsor, CuriosityStream. If you'd
like to watch more videos on topics just like this, you really should check it out. They
have thousands of documentaries and non-fiction shows on pretty much every topic you can think
of. If you enjoy science and technology, which I'm assuming you do since you're watching
my channel, they have documentaries like "The Kingdom: How Fungi Made Our World," or "The
Origami Code," which explores how researchers in robotics, medicine, and nanotechnologies
are embracing “origami philosophy” to try and understand and duplicate nature’s
folding principles.
CuriosityStream really does have something for everyone, including 35 collections handpicked
by experts, including some award winning exclusives and originals. Best of all is that you can
stream to any device, anytime, anywhere.
It really is smart TV for your SmartTV. And they have a special offer for all of you if
you sign up with the code Undecided, you'll get an entire year for just $14.99. That's
an incredible deal. Link is in the description below and thanks to CuriosityStream, and to
all of you, for supporting the channel. So back to the quadfecta ...
Mycelium has also been used in the building industry. One example is the UK-based startup
Biohm. It's been producing a mycelium insulation panel that will be the world’s first accredited
mycelium insulation product. The company manufactures mycelium rigid insulation in accordance with
industry standard 1200 x 2400mm sizing, but custom panels can be manufactured to meet
the needs of any project.
In addition to being healthier and safer, Mycelium outperforms petrochemical/plastic-based
construction materials in thermal and acoustic insulation. Tests show an acoustic absorption
of at least 75% at 1000Hz for mycelium panels, which is the typical frequency of road traffic
noise. On top of that, during a fire, mycelium doesn't cause harmful toxic smoke since it's
not made of synthetic, resin-based compounds.
But using mushrooms as a weight-bearing construction material still requires extensive research
and development. It isn't as strong and doesn't have a long useful lifecycle when compared
to most building materials. For example, concrete can withstand between 4,000 psi - 10,000 psi,
while mushroom bricks can only hold up 30 psi.
But an architectural team known as The Living designed the world's first mushroom brick
tower in 2014. The bricks used to construct the building were grown in three separate
molds. It consisted of 10,000 bricks and reached 40-feet into the air.
Prior to building the tower, engineers subjected the bricks to accelerated aging - a process
that simulated three years of weathering over the course of three weeks. One of the coordinators
at The Living said:
“After three years of accelerated aging the material performed exactly the same as
it did originally,”
A structure made of mycelium was also built for the Dutch Design Week. The Growing Pavilion
was a temporary events space built with mycelium panels supported on a timber frame.
But we’re not stopping at the quadfecta … does that mean we’ve reached the pentafecta?
Is that a word? Pentafecta? I’m going with it. Well, the pentafecta for mycelium is possibly
in wearables … not clothing … but wearable technology.
A curious use of mycelium was investigated in a recent study titled '[Reactive fungal
wearable](https://arxiv.org/pdf/2009.05670.pdf)'. The researchers explored the use of fungi
as a potential candidate for bio wearables. Processors in tech wearables like Fitbits
could be replaced by incorporating mushroom mycelium.
The researchers performed experiments on the electrical response of a hemp fabric captured
by oyster fungi. They attached it to computer sensors and stimulated it with attractants
and repellents. The oyster mushroom mycelium was able to recognize several external stimuli
like temperature, moisture, light, some chemicals in the environment, and even electrical signals
in a way that imitates the same function for sensors and processors.
Dr. Mohammad Mahdi Dehshibi, a researcher with the UOC’s Scene Understanding and Artificial
Intelligence Lab (SUNAI), and the author of the study said:
>"We can reprogramme a geometry and graph-theoretical structure of the mycelium networks and then
use the fungi’s electrical activity to realize computing circuits. Fungi do not only respond
to stimuli and trigger signals accordingly, but also allow us to manipulate them to carry
out computational tasks, in other words, to process information.”
With that pentafecta of applications you can start to see the potential. The more I say
“pentafecta” the worse it sounds. In 2019, the global mushroom market reached a value
of US$ 53.7 Billion, and it's expected that it can reach US$ 86.6 Billion by 2025, which
is a CAGR of 8.3%.
A combo of cost-efficiency, consumer response, and government policies to reduce the use
of plastics will drive the mycelium market. In the U.S., for example, Maine's state government
has banned polystyrene food containers, and the legislation is looking like it will spread
to Colorado, Vermont, New Jersey, and Oregon as well. That action may also pave the way
for a national campaign against styrofoam, which is a substance virtually impossible
to recycle. The ban is expected to force restaurants and grocery stores to look for new options,
making room for mushroom packaging to grow. Yeah … that was a bad joke.
While restaurants and grocery store owners may not be going for mushroom packaging yet
because of slightly higher costs, economies of scale and government support could result
in more opportunities and reduced costs. There’s a lot of possibility for mycelium-based products
to branch out in the near future, and become a popular packaging material. For the other
uses of mycelium, like clothing, food, and construction materials, time will tell if
they can make it to the mainstream.
So what do think? Any uses I missed? Would you want to live in a mycelium insulated home?
Jump into the comments and let me know. If you liked this video be sure to check out
one of the ones I have linked right here. Be sure to subscribe and hit the notification
bell if you think I’ve earned it. And as always, thanks to all of my patrons and a
big welcome to new Producers Cowboy Steve and Kevin Janflone. Your support really helps
to make these videos possible. And thanks to all of you for watching. I’ll see you
in the next one.