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2009 Invention Awards: Greensulate
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.
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Jaclyn on May 26th, 2009 12:31 pm
I wonder how efficient this is at keeping the air out and the cold during the winter. also i wonder if at anytime will this new material become a danger such as being breathed in through the vent system…what about people with mushroom allergies, would they be able to have this in their walls?
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