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Compostable fungi-based replacement for styrofoam
- daenz 4y agoVery cool. I'm convinced that as innovators start taking climate change more seriously, we're going to see incredible new products and processes. I'm sure it won't be enough to quell the death cult hysteria, but will make a huge impact in course correction.
- brink 4y ago> 04 - Reduce cost for packaging So it's cheaper? By how much?
- formvoltron 4y agoObviously that's not the point.
- levitate 4y agoIt's a pretty big point, if you want your product to get picked up by margin-focused corporations.
- not2b 4y agoSome countries are making manufacturers/shippers legally responsible for their waste, they can no longer pass on their externalities to others. Doing that can help shift the decisions on packaging.
- machinerychorus 4y agoProbably by an order of magnitude if you factor in all the externalities. Unfortunately, those externalities probably won't make a difference on the sticker price.
- formvoltron 4y agoCool looks kind of like tempeh.
- ruc0la 4y agoComposting emits CO2
- danans 4y agoCO2 that was sequestered from the atmosphere. That's very different than CO2 in polystyrene which is fossil fuel derived.
- hristov 4y agoIt emits no more CO2 than the thing being composted soaked up when growing. So it will emit less than the amount the mushrooms absorbed. This is the cycle of life. This is not a problem. The problem is when you emit CEO that has been absorbed over hundreds of millions of years and fossilized in oil and gas all within 100 years or so.
- yakubin 4y ago> The problem is when you emit CEO that has been absorbed over hundreds of millions of years and fossilized in oil and gas all within 100 years or so. This typo made my day.
- cmrdporcupine 4y agoIf you're doing it right and using it as soil ammendment, a portion remains in the soil, building up the soil humus. In the long run it can be carbon negative. I could see making something like this from food waste and then just burying it in the ground.
- ents 4y agoDoesn't this already exist from Ecovative? https://www.ecovative.com/pages/packaging https://www.ecovative.com/pages/packaging
- _dain_ 4y agoi hate and distrust fungi. sinister organisms. don't turn your back on them.
- pampa 4y agoOnce i had an idea: instead of styrofoam or packing peanuts just use pop corn or puff rice. Thermal insulation, shock absorbent and biodegradable! Not sure about flame resistant. Also reusable. Make a mash, add some amylase and yeast and you can distill biofuel. Win-win. EDIT: (fungal aspect) seed it with the right spores for container shipping and you get some free penicillin upon delivery!
- deleted 4y ago[deleted]
- elefantastisch 4y agoIt seems like it would be impossible to prevent bugs and rodents from getting into packages in facilities that process packages if there was this much free food available.
- Broken_Hippo 4y agoThis is the main issue with things like popcorn and other foodstuffs: Insects and other pests truly love it. Suddenly, you have an insect problem in places that don't have food.
- fritztastic 4y agoPerhaps it might be feasible were the goods properly sealed? I feel like it would require every step between production to shipment which would require clean environments- that might not be necessarily cost effective, but it is definitely an interesting idea. I would certainly prefer that all packaging be substituted for nontoxic sustainable and compostable materials- it seems doable, additional steps notwithstanding.
- legulere 4y agoPacking peanuts are often made out of corn starch. The problem is how the packaging comes from the receiver to a sensible use.
- selfsimilar 4y agoI'm heartened by the interest in better packaging and it seems like it's having a moment. Last week Cruz Foam[0] (probably a direct competitor) had an announcement that it had some celebrity investors[1]. It's probably not a popular opinion but I think adding more regulations or incentives (tax breaks) to discourage the use of non-biodegradable packaging, especially in foods, is long overdue. [0] - https://www.cruzfoam.com https://www.cruzfoam.com [1] - https://www.cruzfoam.com/post/meet-our-new-investors-advisors https://www.cruzfoam.com/post/meet-our-new-investors-advisor...
- bluSCALE4 4y agoYeah, we have incentives to insulate homes but they all use terrible tech. The best solution still off-gases and can be dangerous if done improperly.
- selfsimilar 4y agoHome insulation has a longer useful life than most packaging, but you're right that it still usually ends up in a landfill. However the current incentives for home insulation are very different - usually to reduce home heating/cooling costs and reduced energy consumption is usually an environmentally sound policy. Should there be further incentives to encourage insulation alternatives which have a more eco-friendly end of life? Absolutely. And that is likely a harder problem given the productive lifetime of an average home, but definitely a worthy place to also put further incentives.
- myshpa 4y agoI think one of the solutions may be based on hemp, currently known as hempcrete or hemp concrete - essentially a mix of hemp hurd (the woody essence of the hemp plant), hydraulic lime, and water. You mix it up and then all you need is just the wooden frame (if you're building load bearing walls), then you wrap it in hempcrete (floors, walls & roof), apply some mud plaster and you're done. No need for 6-10 layers full of plastics & glues. Thanks to use of lime instead of cement the building even captures CO2, as the walls literally turn into stone over time. Some hemp buildings are 200+ years old, in some cave in india they've even found 1500 y.o. hempcrete, and you can compost whole building at EOL. Some other benefits: non-toxic, no off-gassing, no solvents, mold resistance, high vapor permeability, humidity control, durable, sustainable, carbon sequestration, fire and pest resistance, passive self regulation of temperature and humidity, great insulator
- sbeckeriv 4y agocan i eat it?
- gruuya 4y agoFunny enough, my initial impression was that it looks tasty as it reminded me of Camembert cheese.
- ozten 4y agoHow long does it take to grow one unit? How much space does that unit take up during growth? How stable is the product before use? Very cool stuff, my take-away from reading about earlier fungi-base packaging is that it is hard to scale in a cost effective way. I've grown oyster mushroom "leather" which was fun, but took about 6 weeks for a 3" diameter.
- tlholaday 4y ago"What's time to a pig?" That is, what is the scarce resource for oyster mushroom leather, given that forestry requires a dozen years?
- timeon 4y agoI wonder if there is something like this also for building insulation.
- danans 4y agoIt would have to be treated with something like borate to retard the decomposition (AKA composting) process. This is already done to cellulose and wood fiber insulation, but it's not clear if this material could be similarly treated.
- voakbasda 4y agoInteresting, but growing fungi requires large amounts of water, yet this resource has been omitted this input from their "impact" diagram. At scale, the "manufacturing" process for this product likely will require an insane amount of fresh, clean water. With potable water already a constrained resource in many areas, how big can a single factory be scaled before running afoul of their local community?
- jmhobbs 4y agoDoes it if you're not fruiting them though? I make 5lb hardwood sawdust bags with about a quart, quart and a half of water, and that's all that is needed for the mycelium to colonize the whole thing. I suppose at scale a liter for a 12"x6"x6" block is perhaps a bit much lot.
- drewm1980 4y agoHobby gourmet mushroom grower here. For gourmet mushrooms you use about 60 percent water. For this purpose it is probably lower. Many products require many times their weight in water; this is not that bad. Mushrooms care more about competing bacteria and fungi than impurities... I imagine pasteurized groundwater or rainwater would be good enough for this. Drying and killing the mycelium could be energy intensive depending on the local climate. Maybe they recapture most of the water during the bake... It would already be sterile.
- jl6 4y agoWhat kind of products could you package using this material that you couldn’t package in cardboard?
- aaaaaaaaaaab 4y agoLooks like tempeh. Can you eat it?
- desireco42 4y agoIt is wonderful but in the past these could not be produced in large quantities enough to be actually used as packaging. It takes long to grow fungi and not all succeed. In general happy that business are going this way.
- Digerron 4y agocool
- Digerron 4y agonicw
- fnordpiglet 4y agoI for one welcome our new Biosporin overlords.
- westurner 4y agoHow does this product compare to aerogel, which is inorganic without minor radiation? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aerogel https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aerogel > Aerogels are produced by extracting the liquid component of a gel through supercritical drying or freeze-drying. This allows the liquid to be slowly dried off without causing the solid matrix in the gel to collapse from capillary action, as would happen with conventional evaporation. The first aerogels were produced from silica gels. Kistler's later work involved aerogels based on alumina, chromia and tin dioxide. Carbon aerogels were first developed in the late 1980s.[12] Can aerogels be made with {formed,?} fungi-based production processes?
- neltnerb 4y agoAerogels tend to be fairly brittle, but more recent innovations make them probably work. Fundamentally they are defined when you remove a solvent from a gel supercritically. High temperatures or pressures. Not very friendly for organics, but probably could work with a polymer. Of course if you just want a low density polymer with air in it that's just styrofoam. The organic part is the interesting bit, and organic stuff usually has better strength due to multi-dimensional patterning whereas an aerogel would tend to have a single structure throughout.
- samatman 4y agoIn this domain it's important to remember that organic means carbon-containing, the word you're looking for is biological or biochemical. Polystyrene is an organic compound.
- neltnerb 4y agoSorry to have confused you. I used simplified language because this is not a site filled with chemists and I wanted to avoid confusing people.
- westurner 4y agoIs it a carbon sink organic compound? Does it offgas VOCs? HS chem was years ago. Does jsmol/pymol work in Jupiter notebooks? That probably doesn't at all model heat or other QFT or QG fields. Though this one probably doesn't require an understanding of how quantum chemistry is actually occurring (Q12 STEM), I found this for protyping, which "operates on abstract data structures allowing the formulation, combination, automatic differentiation and optimization of generalized objectives. Tequila can execute the underlying quantum expectation values on state of the art simulators as well as on real quantum devices." https://github.com/tequilahub/tequila#quantum-backends https://github.com/tequilahub/tequila#quantum-backends
- userbinator 4y agoBiodegradable so they can keep making it, and you can keep throwing things away and buying more to feed their profits, because it's "environmentally friendly"? I already have to deal with rotted cardboard insulation, mice-chewed foam and the like when restoring old products; with things like this, it makes me wonder what those of the future will have to face, or indeed whether there will be anything left to preserve. The mentions of "regulatory action" are likewise similarly disturbing. Perhaps historians will call it the eco-plague. The name also sounds more like an antibiotic than a packaging material.
- fritztastic 4y agofwiw petrochemicals are abundant in single-use packaging which is thrown away, they take decades/centuries to break down and recently microplastics have become a source of concern. I think many people have acknowledged the excess waste issue and want to address it by providing alternatives. Meanwhile a compostable material such as fungi can be broken down and reintroduced into the environment in a minimally destructibe way. The same cannot be said of plastics. Also fungi make good fertilizer as well.
- beloch 4y agoThe site is really vague. I'd be interested to know what kind of fungus is being used and how economical they are to grow. e.g. The site claims that production uses "98% lest energy than expanded polystyrene" and is produced from waste. Does this include the cost of growing the fungus? The language is ambiguous. Mushrooms are one of the less energy and water intensive edible crops that can be grown. If you wanted to make an environmentally friendly bio-material, fungus is a great choice versus corn or other vegetables. However, transporting waste to fungus farms, sorting the waste, growing the fungus, etc. are not costs that should be neglected when trying to compare the environmental impact of this material to styrofoam and other styrofoam alternatives.
- worewood 4y agoI like the idea, but usually durable and degradable don't go together, so I'm skeptical of its use in e.g. construction.
- Fomite 4y agoI think we need a new term to distinguish "Compostable in an industrial composting facility" vs. "Toss this in the average at-home compost bin". It's hard to tell with any given product, and most manufacturers in the former category are more than happy to coyly suggest the latter. Not saying anything about this particular product, but it's a thing I've been noticing more.
- bradknowles 4y agoThis is a problem across the entire composting and recycling ecosystem.
- ComradePhil 4y agoStyrofoam is biodegradable if you think long term. 500 years is nothing and it's very manageable. If you genuinely come up with something better and are able to get into the market, that's great... but don't try to sell "compostable" as a feature. I don't want my packaging to potentially come rotten.