Eben Bayer is against the waste that comes from standard packaging materials. He says that in a cubic foot of standard packaging material there’s the equivalent of 1.5 Liters of petrol.
After a few weeks of use, the packaging is thrown in the trash. The EPA estimates that by volume packaging material occupies 25 percent of our landfills. Bayer’s solution is to grow organic packaging from mushrooms.
In his TED Talk Are mushrooms the new plastic? Eben discusses his methods and ideas for biodegradable packaging materials.
Partnering with Gavin McIntyre during a Inventor’s Studio class at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute in 2006 Bayer developed a system to take agricultural waste and mycelium to create insulation. This eventually turned into their company Ecovative and the insulation turned into packaging materials.
The company purchases agricultural waste from local farmers, and then cleans the waste and adds mycelium, a material found in the root structure of mushrooms. The mixture is bagged and the mycelium treats the agricultural waste as food and begins to digest it. The digestion forms a matrix of fibers and after another processing cycle the particles are put into a form where the mycelium grows free and fills any void space in the mixture. The material is then dried and heated to stop growth and prevent the mycelium from forming mushrooms. After use the packaging material is completely biodegradable.
Bayer was named as one of Forbes’ 30 Under 30 for 2015, as the face of the Manufacturing and Industry section. Ecovative currently makes Myco Board, an organic replacement for particle board, Myco Foam to replace Styrofoam and the Myco Make kit that allows consumers and educators to grow their own mycelium based projects. A flexible foam intended for shoe soles and seat cushions and a seed starter / floral foam are in development now. A limited edition Maker Faire Robot mold was available at New York’s Maker Faire in September 2015 for consumers to grow their own mushroom robot form. It’s incredibly exciting to see a company with this level of innovation moving in so many product directions at once.