9 ms·

Mushrooms: Next big thing in environmentally-friendly packaging, construction?

275 points by DocFeind 5y ago

0x0000000 5y ago
I remember reading about Eben and Gavin (founders of Ecovative which powers Mushroom Packaging) about 15 years ago in some promotional material from their alma mater. If I recall correctly, they did have a deal with Dell at one point for their packaging. It's cool to see they're still working on this and have raised quite a bit more money since then.
rfreytag 5y ago
For TOR users: https://archive.ph/9fEMt https://archive.ph/9fEMt
revscat 5y ago
> One of the market leaders in mycelium pack-tech is Ecovate Design, based in New York, which closed a $60 million round of funding last year. One of the company’s products is Mushroom® Packaging, which is made with just hemp hurd, a byproduct of the fiber hemp industry, and mycelium to form a solid composite form that is light, strong, fire, and water-resistant. This is all well and good, but how do they manage to have a trademark on the word “mushroom”?
- giantg2 5y ago
  I have a similar thought. Just to be clear though, it's a Brand and not a Trademark. I think brands do not have the restriction of being original since it's just the name you want to be identified by. But I could be missing something.
  - ijlx 5y ago
    ® is the symbol for "registered trademark" though?
    - giantg2 5y ago
      True. I guess a brand is just a subset of a trademark with the only additional requirement that it be made of words and not symbols. And it seems that because the packaging is the mycelium and not actually mushrooms, that they can use "Mushroom". Interesting. https://secureyourtrademark.com/can-you-trademark/common-words-phrases/ https://secureyourtrademark.com/can-you-trademark/common-wor...
- dymk 5y ago
  Likely the same way that Apple holds their name
  - CameronNemo 5y ago
    But in that case the computers are not literally made of apples.
    - iratewizard 5y ago
      Source?
- gamblor956 5y ago
  Because mushrooms are traditionally food, and not packaging, so the "trade" mark is relevant and claimable with respect to packing materials. They would have difficulty enforcing the trademark against other uses of mushroom, and attempts to do so could result in their trademark being voided on breadth grounds.
- deleted 5y ago
  [deleted]
giantg2 5y ago
You can try this at home, sort of. It will yield tasty mushrooms but will be too heavy to use for shipping. You can grow mushrooms on substrate in bags. After inoculation you can form the substrate (mostly wet sawdust) into different shapes within the bag. Or you can buy them pre-made in blocks if you want to skip inoculation, sterilization, etc https://www.woodlandjewel.com/shop https://www.woodlandjewel.com/shop
- belval 5y ago
  Pre-made are pretty cool, but I'd be wary of DIY-ing mushroom cultures. There are several YouTube channels dedicated to this and they explain all the contingency that they use to prevent contamination and it's surprisingly non-trivial.
  - cwkoss 5y ago
    Yep, all of my amateur gourmet mushroom growing attempts have resulted in contamination sooner or later. The good attempts had several flushes before mold set in, the bad attempts created such foul odors they went straight into the compost (or garbage for the most offensive result) Seems like creating an environment that certain funguses like but others don't is pretty tricky, and mostly relies on giving your chosen fungus a head start unless you can maintain perfect sterility.
    - monetus 5y ago
      Flow hoods for the win! You probably know that, but it should be said in case someone reading does not. If you can't buy one, diy a decent one, then keep the air in your workroom as stagnant as possible and cross your fingers.
      - giantg2 5y ago
        The problem with flow hoods is that most people don't want to, or can't, leave them on indefinitely. Once theyre off, the air will carry contaminates to the clean side. That's basically what I realized after a DIY using setup that looks like an open front glovebox with a HEPA filter blowing air through it.
fluxify 5y ago
I was part of a team experimenting with mushroom packaging about 3 years ago. While we had quite good results material-wise, we couldn’t really make the total environmental equation work on smaller scales. Growing the mycelium really fast and efficiently requires quite a bit of energy input (heating, humidity controls, airflow…) and you need to source quite a few ingredients for the growth medium. I’d be curious what the total ecological impact is if all of those inputs are factored in when doing it on a large scale (like Ecovative).
- samstave 5y ago
  What I would love to see would be the combining of indoor cannabis farming and mycelium growth. Do you think this would be a workable symbiosis?
  - brianhorakh 5y ago
    Yes, i work on exactly this now, for years, many failures. Co2 output from mushroom is the input to cannabis. Temperature differential is a real problem.
    - monetus 5y ago
      Find any mycelium that help the root systems?
      - samstave 5y ago
        AFAIK all mycelium helps root systems, from the symbiotic relation, but in indoor, hydro type grows it might be harder. What would be interesting is the combination of vertical mushroom grows and vertical hydro culture. Imagine a tube/tower of mycelium, but also allowing the cannabis to grw out of the tube/tower... and having the root systems intertwined, but the problem therein is that the diff in the mycelium being perennial as opposed to the cannabis being annual...
        monetus 5y ago
meristohm 5y ago
While this is cool, and I far prefer materials I can put in the compost pile over those bound for Trash Mountain, Incinerator, or Recycling Operation, the better action is to decrease demand by getting by with less, collectively. I'm not appealing to individuals to change their behavior, but to regulatory agencies so there's a sense of fairness.
- malleefowl 5y ago
  According to the Mushroom Packaging FAQ, it’s home compostable
- wy35 5y ago
  Mushroom mycelium is organic material, so it is compostable. Why do you think it wouldn’t be? In fact, mycelium composts faster since it contains more nutrients than cardboard. Leftover mycelium is nutritious enough to be used as fertilizer for growing other crops.
  - meristohm 5y ago
    Of course it is, and that’s great. I made a mistake in my writing.
solomonb 5y ago
You have to grow the fungi on some organic material such as sawdust using a ton of energy and disposable plastics to sterilize and culture the mycelium. Why not simply use the sawdust or whatever as a soft packing material on its own?
- hahamrfunnyguy 5y ago
  In all of the use cases where I have seen mushroom packaging being called for, a traditional green packaging could have been used instead. Recycled paper is a very versatile material and is very easy to work with. A wide variety of packaging can be made from cardboard & cardstock with a simple steel rule die. If custom shapes are needed, then compressed fiber like fast-food drink trays are an option. There are starch-based packing peanuts that can replace polystyrene peanuts. There's a lot more room for innovation beyond what we already have too, I think Amazon's paper mailers are a good example.
  - solomonb 5y ago
    I'm with you 100% on this. I actually cultivate gourmet mushrooms as a hobby (started about 15 years ago when I took a course in university) and am a big fan of mycology and the importance of fungi ecologically, nutritionally, and medicinally. However, there are, IMO, currently significant environmental downsides to indoor mushroom cultivation. Mushrooms are having a "moment" and there is a gold rush to throw them at everything under the sun.
- wy35 5y ago
  Have you ever felt mycelium? Mycelium is much softer than loose sawdust. It’s very bouncy and porous. There’s exceptions, of course. Reishi mycelium is extremely hard. A student once created a canoe out of Reishi mycelium and successfully paddled it around. Hobbyists who grow Reishi at home often complain how it is nearly impossible to scoop Reishi mycelium out of the jars they grow in. But I digress, the vast majority of species have soft mycelium.
  - solomonb 5y ago
hahamrfunnyguy 5y ago
It's a neat idea but also an impractical, unrealistic one. This sort of packaging can't be produced quickly like current green alternatives like compressed fiber. A lot of space is needed to let the packaging grow. Just grow mushrooms for food and make packaging from other green materials.
elldoubleyew 5y ago
Unrelated to the article but why do modern browsers still allow the native back button functionality to be prevented like this? When I tried to go back from this page it presented me with "articles to check before you go" which is infuriating.
- slig 5y ago
  They managed to make something more infuriating than the "before you go" exit intention modal.
- dang 5y ago
  "Please don't complain about tangential annoyances—things like article or website formats, name collisions, or back-button breakage. They're too common to be interesting." https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
- dylan604 5y ago
  SPAs. They allowed history manipulation to allow state updating via URL without triggering a page reload. Design a thing for a purpose, people will use that thing for a different purpose. Those new purposes are not always benign.
- kevin_thibedeau 5y ago
  Install NoScript and these hostile games stop being effective.
givemeethekeys 5y ago
Some quick searching indicates that, unlike what the article suggests, we can compost cardboard at home.
- solomonb 5y ago
  It is in fact trivial to compost cardboard at home! I consider cardboard a valuable resource around the garden and use it for a variety of soil building related applications.
lvs 5y ago
> If cement manufacturing alone were a country, it would be the third-largest emitter of CO2 on the planet. Since mushrooms are relatively easy to feed, can be grown anywhere, and are appealing to increasingly environmentally aware consumers, we expect to see significant growth in mushroom tech solutions in building materials. Mushrooms are not plants. They don't photosynthesize and fix carbon dioxide from the air. Growing mushrooms is still carbon positive. It's important to understand that this is an organism that respires, so these generic claims about a carbon benefit need much more analysis to understand whether there is in fact a benefit at scale.
- BizarroLand 5y ago
  By themselves they may not remove carbon from the air but they do sequester carbon by consuming carbon stores and converting them into different products. You could, in theory, make a wolffia farm (Wolffia being the fastest growing plant on the planet and very carbon hungry to boot) and feed the wolffia to mushrooms to convert them into building, clothing, and packing materials and thus create a cycle of utilitarian carbon sequestration https://www.cshl.edu/how-to-bury-carbon-let-plants-do-the-dirty-work/ https://www.cshl.edu/how-to-bury-carbon-let-plants-do-the-di... https://cleantechnica.com/2013/04/04/mushrooms-could-be-key-to-safe-and-natural-carbon-sequestration/ https://cleantechnica.com/2013/04/04/mushrooms-could-be-key-...
  - lvs 5y ago
    > they do sequester carbon by consuming carbon stores They can't sequester any more carbon than was in the feed stock. And when you're trying to sell a biodegradable thing (which I think is laudable), this would have a minimal net effect on carbon for a material that is readily disposed and biodegrades within a few weeks. The benefits of reducing plastic waste, landfill, and pollution are obvious. The carbon benefits are less clear. Paper packaging from pulp waste comes directly from a photosynthetic resource, and may be found to be equivalent materials. So the argument for mushrooms as an intermediate seems like it needs more explanation -- to me anyway. Obviously, a bioplastic that never degrades is a far better carbon sink than a material that degrades readily, but then you are generating waste that must be stored somewhere indefinitely. Not a problem for a building material, but obviously not great for packaging. But I don't see how a building material made from mushrooms could ever sequester more carbon than, you know, wood.
steveaux 5y ago
I'm glad to see work being done on packaging alternatives, especially biodegradable/compostable solutions. However I have one issue with using mushrooms: these life forms are so remarkable and so valuable for nutritional and medicinal purposes that the time and energy spent cultivating them just for packaging material is a terrific waste of resources in itself. Search "medicinal mushrooms" or "fantastic fungi" to gain an understanding of the extraordinary nutritive potency and medicinal potential of mycelial crops. Perhaps a symbiosis between mushroom growers and processers could be worked out, whereby nutrients and medicines are first extracted and concentrated, and the 'drosses' or fibrous remains are then processed into packing and construction materials. In other words, if you're taking the trouble to grow mushrooms, maximize your resource and production capabilities. The same sort of thing could be done with cannabis cultivars, could it not? I'm looking toward a future of zero waste, of all materials and energy generation.
danans 5y ago
Ecovative has a spinoff (https://myforestfoods.com/ https://myforestfoods.com/) that makes a mushroom based "bacon" that I'd like to try. Last I heard they were only selling it at a few stores in upstate New York. Anyone tried it?
DonHopkins 5y ago
Crime Pays But Botany Doesn't: The Ethnomycology of Ugly Landscaping: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RHRgY8fZNv4 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RHRgY8fZNv4 Late Night at the Mushroom Lab: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kJVXAALRfRo https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kJVXAALRfRo
- elasticventures 5y ago
  Thank you, these didn't disappoint!
- filoeleven 5y ago
  This is such a fun channel, and it’s been great to see him getting into mycology. Here’s another one with Alan (and the dogs) in a coastal redwood forest. https://youtu.be/apTVau6jplk https://youtu.be/apTVau6jplk He’s also had a few mushroom guys on his podcast now, for instance ep. 97: How do fungi bang (and evolve)? Fungal reproduction is…weird.

275 points by DocFeind 5y ago

I remember reading about Eben and Gavin (founders of Ecovative which powers Mushroom Packaging) about 15 years ago in some promotional material from their alma mater. If I recall correctly, they did have a deal with Dell at one point for their packaging. It's cool to see they're still working on this and have raised quite a bit more money since then.

rfreytag 5y ago

For TOR users: https://archive.ph/9fEMt https://archive.ph/9fEMt

revscat 5y ago

> One of the market leaders in mycelium pack-tech is Ecovate Design, based in New York, which closed a $60 million round of funding last year. One of the company’s products is Mushroom® Packaging, which is made with just hemp hurd, a byproduct of the fiber hemp industry, and mycelium to form a solid composite form that is light, strong, fire, and water-resistant. This is all well and good, but how do they manage to have a trademark on the word “mushroom”?

giantg2 5y ago
I have a similar thought. Just to be clear though, it's a Brand and not a Trademark. I think brands do not have the restriction of being original since it's just the name you want to be identified by. But I could be missing something.
- ijlx 5y ago
  ® is the symbol for "registered trademark" though?
  - giantg2 5y ago
    True. I guess a brand is just a subset of a trademark with the only additional requirement that it be made of words and not symbols. And it seems that because the packaging is the mycelium and not actually mushrooms, that they can use "Mushroom". Interesting. https://secureyourtrademark.com/can-you-trademark/common-words-phrases/ https://secureyourtrademark.com/can-you-trademark/common-wor...
dymk 5y ago
Likely the same way that Apple holds their name
- CameronNemo 5y ago
  But in that case the computers are not literally made of apples.
  - iratewizard 5y ago
    Source?
gamblor956 5y ago
Because mushrooms are traditionally food, and not packaging, so the "trade" mark is relevant and claimable with respect to packing materials. They would have difficulty enforcing the trademark against other uses of mushroom, and attempts to do so could result in their trademark being voided on breadth grounds.
deleted 5y ago
[deleted]

giantg2 5y ago

You can try this at home, sort of. It will yield tasty mushrooms but will be too heavy to use for shipping. You can grow mushrooms on substrate in bags. After inoculation you can form the substrate (mostly wet sawdust) into different shapes within the bag. Or you can buy them pre-made in blocks if you want to skip inoculation, sterilization, etc https://www.woodlandjewel.com/shop https://www.woodlandjewel.com/shop

belval 5y ago
Pre-made are pretty cool, but I'd be wary of DIY-ing mushroom cultures. There are several YouTube channels dedicated to this and they explain all the contingency that they use to prevent contamination and it's surprisingly non-trivial.
- cwkoss 5y ago
  Yep, all of my amateur gourmet mushroom growing attempts have resulted in contamination sooner or later. The good attempts had several flushes before mold set in, the bad attempts created such foul odors they went straight into the compost (or garbage for the most offensive result) Seems like creating an environment that certain funguses like but others don't is pretty tricky, and mostly relies on giving your chosen fungus a head start unless you can maintain perfect sterility.
  - monetus 5y ago
    Flow hoods for the win! You probably know that, but it should be said in case someone reading does not. If you can't buy one, diy a decent one, then keep the air in your workroom as stagnant as possible and cross your fingers.
    - giantg2 5y ago
      The problem with flow hoods is that most people don't want to, or can't, leave them on indefinitely. Once theyre off, the air will carry contaminates to the clean side. That's basically what I realized after a DIY using setup that looks like an open front glovebox with a HEPA filter blowing air through it.

fluxify 5y ago

I was part of a team experimenting with mushroom packaging about 3 years ago. While we had quite good results material-wise, we couldn’t really make the total environmental equation work on smaller scales. Growing the mycelium really fast and efficiently requires quite a bit of energy input (heating, humidity controls, airflow…) and you need to source quite a few ingredients for the growth medium. I’d be curious what the total ecological impact is if all of those inputs are factored in when doing it on a large scale (like Ecovative).

samstave 5y ago
What I would love to see would be the combining of indoor cannabis farming and mycelium growth. Do you think this would be a workable symbiosis?
- brianhorakh 5y ago
  Yes, i work on exactly this now, for years, many failures. Co2 output from mushroom is the input to cannabis. Temperature differential is a real problem.
  - monetus 5y ago
    Find any mycelium that help the root systems?
    - samstave 5y ago
      AFAIK all mycelium helps root systems, from the symbiotic relation, but in indoor, hydro type grows it might be harder. What would be interesting is the combination of vertical mushroom grows and vertical hydro culture. Imagine a tube/tower of mycelium, but also allowing the cannabis to grw out of the tube/tower... and having the root systems intertwined, but the problem therein is that the diff in the mycelium being perennial as opposed to the cannabis being annual...
      - monetus 5y ago

meristohm 5y ago

While this is cool, and I far prefer materials I can put in the compost pile over those bound for Trash Mountain, Incinerator, or Recycling Operation, the better action is to decrease demand by getting by with less, collectively. I'm not appealing to individuals to change their behavior, but to regulatory agencies so there's a sense of fairness.

malleefowl 5y ago
According to the Mushroom Packaging FAQ, it’s home compostable
wy35 5y ago
Mushroom mycelium is organic material, so it is compostable. Why do you think it wouldn’t be? In fact, mycelium composts faster since it contains more nutrients than cardboard. Leftover mycelium is nutritious enough to be used as fertilizer for growing other crops.
- meristohm 5y ago
  Of course it is, and that’s great. I made a mistake in my writing.

solomonb 5y ago

You have to grow the fungi on some organic material such as sawdust using a ton of energy and disposable plastics to sterilize and culture the mycelium. Why not simply use the sawdust or whatever as a soft packing material on its own?

hahamrfunnyguy 5y ago
In all of the use cases where I have seen mushroom packaging being called for, a traditional green packaging could have been used instead. Recycled paper is a very versatile material and is very easy to work with. A wide variety of packaging can be made from cardboard & cardstock with a simple steel rule die. If custom shapes are needed, then compressed fiber like fast-food drink trays are an option. There are starch-based packing peanuts that can replace polystyrene peanuts. There's a lot more room for innovation beyond what we already have too, I think Amazon's paper mailers are a good example.
- solomonb 5y ago
  I'm with you 100% on this. I actually cultivate gourmet mushrooms as a hobby (started about 15 years ago when I took a course in university) and am a big fan of mycology and the importance of fungi ecologically, nutritionally, and medicinally. However, there are, IMO, currently significant environmental downsides to indoor mushroom cultivation. Mushrooms are having a "moment" and there is a gold rush to throw them at everything under the sun.
wy35 5y ago
Have you ever felt mycelium? Mycelium is much softer than loose sawdust. It’s very bouncy and porous. There’s exceptions, of course. Reishi mycelium is extremely hard. A student once created a canoe out of Reishi mycelium and successfully paddled it around. Hobbyists who grow Reishi at home often complain how it is nearly impossible to scoop Reishi mycelium out of the jars they grow in. But I digress, the vast majority of species have soft mycelium.
- solomonb 5y ago

hahamrfunnyguy 5y ago

It's a neat idea but also an impractical, unrealistic one. This sort of packaging can't be produced quickly like current green alternatives like compressed fiber. A lot of space is needed to let the packaging grow. Just grow mushrooms for food and make packaging from other green materials.

elldoubleyew 5y ago

Unrelated to the article but why do modern browsers still allow the native back button functionality to be prevented like this? When I tried to go back from this page it presented me with "articles to check before you go" which is infuriating.

slig 5y ago
They managed to make something more infuriating than the "before you go" exit intention modal.
dang 5y ago
"Please don't complain about tangential annoyances—things like article or website formats, name collisions, or back-button breakage. They're too common to be interesting." https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
dylan604 5y ago
SPAs. They allowed history manipulation to allow state updating via URL without triggering a page reload. Design a thing for a purpose, people will use that thing for a different purpose. Those new purposes are not always benign.
kevin_thibedeau 5y ago
Install NoScript and these hostile games stop being effective.

givemeethekeys 5y ago

Some quick searching indicates that, unlike what the article suggests, we can compost cardboard at home.

solomonb 5y ago
It is in fact trivial to compost cardboard at home! I consider cardboard a valuable resource around the garden and use it for a variety of soil building related applications.

lvs 5y ago

> If cement manufacturing alone were a country, it would be the third-largest emitter of CO2 on the planet. Since mushrooms are relatively easy to feed, can be grown anywhere, and are appealing to increasingly environmentally aware consumers, we expect to see significant growth in mushroom tech solutions in building materials. Mushrooms are not plants. They don't photosynthesize and fix carbon dioxide from the air. Growing mushrooms is still carbon positive. It's important to understand that this is an organism that respires, so these generic claims about a carbon benefit need much more analysis to understand whether there is in fact a benefit at scale.

BizarroLand 5y ago
By themselves they may not remove carbon from the air but they do sequester carbon by consuming carbon stores and converting them into different products. You could, in theory, make a wolffia farm (Wolffia being the fastest growing plant on the planet and very carbon hungry to boot) and feed the wolffia to mushrooms to convert them into building, clothing, and packing materials and thus create a cycle of utilitarian carbon sequestration https://www.cshl.edu/how-to-bury-carbon-let-plants-do-the-dirty-work/ https://www.cshl.edu/how-to-bury-carbon-let-plants-do-the-di... https://cleantechnica.com/2013/04/04/mushrooms-could-be-key-to-safe-and-natural-carbon-sequestration/ https://cleantechnica.com/2013/04/04/mushrooms-could-be-key-...
- lvs 5y ago
  > they do sequester carbon by consuming carbon stores They can't sequester any more carbon than was in the feed stock. And when you're trying to sell a biodegradable thing (which I think is laudable), this would have a minimal net effect on carbon for a material that is readily disposed and biodegrades within a few weeks. The benefits of reducing plastic waste, landfill, and pollution are obvious. The carbon benefits are less clear. Paper packaging from pulp waste comes directly from a photosynthetic resource, and may be found to be equivalent materials. So the argument for mushrooms as an intermediate seems like it needs more explanation -- to me anyway. Obviously, a bioplastic that never degrades is a far better carbon sink than a material that degrades readily, but then you are generating waste that must be stored somewhere indefinitely. Not a problem for a building material, but obviously not great for packaging. But I don't see how a building material made from mushrooms could ever sequester more carbon than, you know, wood.

steveaux 5y ago

I'm glad to see work being done on packaging alternatives, especially biodegradable/compostable solutions. However I have one issue with using mushrooms: these life forms are so remarkable and so valuable for nutritional and medicinal purposes that the time and energy spent cultivating them just for packaging material is a terrific waste of resources in itself. Search "medicinal mushrooms" or "fantastic fungi" to gain an understanding of the extraordinary nutritive potency and medicinal potential of mycelial crops. Perhaps a symbiosis between mushroom growers and processers could be worked out, whereby nutrients and medicines are first extracted and concentrated, and the 'drosses' or fibrous remains are then processed into packing and construction materials. In other words, if you're taking the trouble to grow mushrooms, maximize your resource and production capabilities. The same sort of thing could be done with cannabis cultivars, could it not? I'm looking toward a future of zero waste, of all materials and energy generation.

danans 5y ago

Ecovative has a spinoff (https://myforestfoods.com/ https://myforestfoods.com/) that makes a mushroom based "bacon" that I'd like to try. Last I heard they were only selling it at a few stores in upstate New York. Anyone tried it?

DonHopkins 5y ago

Crime Pays But Botany Doesn't: The Ethnomycology of Ugly Landscaping: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RHRgY8fZNv4 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RHRgY8fZNv4 Late Night at the Mushroom Lab: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kJVXAALRfRo https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kJVXAALRfRo

elasticventures 5y ago
Thank you, these didn't disappoint!
filoeleven 5y ago
This is such a fun channel, and it’s been great to see him getting into mycology. Here’s another one with Alan (and the dogs) in a coastal redwood forest. https://youtu.be/apTVau6jplk https://youtu.be/apTVau6jplk He’s also had a few mushroom guys on his podcast now, for instance ep. 97: How do fungi bang (and evolve)? Fungal reproduction is…weird.