The mighty mycelium: Mushrooms make eco-friendly packaging
[div class="excerpt" style="border:solid 1px #000000"]Firm uses mushrooms to make eco-friendly packaging
Mushrooms are a key ingredient in pale, soft blocks produced by the thousands in an upstate New York plant. The blocks are used to cushion products ranging from Dell servers to furniture for Crate and Barrel.
More precisely, the packaging blocks are made with mycelium — the hidden "roots" of the mushroom that usually thread beneath soil or wood. Two former mechanical engineering and design students in their 20s, Eben Bayer and Gavin McIntyre, figured out how to grow those cottony filaments in a way that binds together seed husks or other agricultural byproducts into packaging shapes.
Workers at Ecovative inoculate mycelium into pasteurized bits of seed husks or plant stalks, then place the mix into clear plastic molds shaped like the desired packaging pieces, such as a cradle-shaped mold for a wine bottle.
The mix is covered for about five days as millions of mycelium strands grow around and through the feedstock, acting as a kind of glue. The piece is heat dried to kill the fungus, insuring that mushrooms can't sprout from it. Since the mycelium is cloned, the product does not include spores, which can trigger allergies. The packaging is edible, technically, though it doesn't look appetizing and isn't recommended as a snack.
Cool idea! Mushrooms are a real jack of all trades.
I'm not as sure about their aspiration to become the Dow or DuPont of the 21st century, but it makes attention-getting copy.
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