Eben Bayer and Gavin McIntyre want to line the walls of your home with mushrooms.
The young entrepreneurs have created a strong, low-cost biomaterial that could replace the expensive, environmentally harmful Styrofoam and plastics used in wall insulation, as well as in packaging and a host of other products.
Wind-turbine blades and auto-body panels aren’t out of the realm of possibility, either.
“We like to call it low-tech biotech,” Bayer says. In the lab, the inventors grow mycelia, the vegetative roots of mushrooms that resemble bundles of white fiber.
But instead of soil, the roots grow in a bed of agricultural by-products like buckwheat husks, and those intertwining fibers give the material structural support.
The mixture is placed inside a panel (or whatever shape is required) and, after 10 to 14 days, the mycelia develop a dense network – just one cubic inch of the white-and-brown-specked “Greensulate” insulation contains eight miles of interconnected mycelia strands.
The panels are dried in an oven at between 100° and 150°F to stop mycelia growth, and at the end of two weeks, they’re ready for your walls.
Photo by Popular Science.