How Mushroom Startups Use Fungi To Fight Waste | World Wide Waste | Insider Business

[Music] the world is witnessing a shroom boom there are over 10 000 varieties of mushrooms on planet Earth and we're still discovering new ways to grow them for food and Medicine mushrooms can remove pollution from soil some can be used to replace plastic and others can be used to digest it what are fungi are they aliens can they help us since 2017 the global market for mushrooms has grown 30 percent to 50 billion dollars now inventors around the globe are turning mushrooms into bacon packaging material and even coffins we looked at four different businesses building a more sustainable future out of fungi it looks like a giant marshmallow but it's actually a mushroom slice it and you get crispy vegan bacon or a convincing alternative to leather and this lab grows in eco-friendly replacement to polystyrene foam that light but bulky material taking up a third of the space in all landfills but can this company grow it fast enough to make a global impact we visited ecovative's headquarters in Green Island New York to find out the magic is in mycelium The Living Root structures of mushrooms our entire philosophy is actually based around this idea that nature provides mycelium is a great solution to both the Plastics waste problem we face as well as animal agriculture I'm taking the mushroom mycelium and then I'm just going to section this petri dish all ecovative products start with these natural building blocks we have about 100 different strains in-house and we will analyze those for the different material properties that they have what do you think about the wall thickness on this pretty thin the company's best selling product is called micro composite it has similar properties to styrofoam but it's completely biodegradable we've worked with a variety of companies some of them huge companies like Dell computers where they've used our Earth friendly packaging to ship servers we've worked also with small New York startup Brands like keep candles [Music] factors design molds using large recyclable plastic sheets heat makes the sheets pliable so they can be shaped around any product they start with wood chips corn husks or hemp then sprinkle in some fungal spores and add water pack the mixture into the molds and the mycelium starts to grow feeding on the shredded agricultural waste just over a week later the form-fitted mold is ready to ship so this jar jar ecovative has a different process to make vegan meat and leather which it claims consumes far fewer resources than the real thing then we're going to take this substrate which will inoculate this sawdust workers still start with agricultural waste and spores but these mixtures are placed in vertical Farms growth chambers that mimic the conditions of natural soil and so what it's really trying to do is grow up and punch out through the Earth to form a mushroom but we keep the environment such that it just grows and grows into this large marshmallow-like structure that marshmallow is called aerial mycelium and it grows over the course of about 10 days we've just changed their shape from a mushroom to a slab that's 100 feet long and four feet wide ecovative can produce up to three million pounds of mycelium per year in 2018 the company licensed its leather process to bolt threads they make Milo a leather alternative that has been used in clothing and Handbags the company also has a line of mushroom-based meat Alternatives called my Forest Foods the my is short for mycelium the first product is called my bacon and it's made from aerial mycelium that's cut into slices compressed and seasoned it fries up and gets crispy just like bacon and tastes pretty amazing too we can't confirm the flavor but my bacon is definitely a healthier option it's high in fiber and has the same protein content as a slice of pork bacon with one-fifth of the fat the company projects that as it scales up my bacon can eventually be grown for one dollar per pound the market price of pork bacon is nearly seven times that and it takes nearly 600 gallons of water to produce one pound of pork but just over one gallon of water to grow a pound of mycelium bacon the market for meat substitutes was worth almost 8 billion dollars in 2022 and it's set to nearly double over the next five years mycelium protein can mimic whole cuts of meat as opposed to most other plant-based Alternatives that come in the form of minced Patties or sausages my bacon is available in over 40 stores in the northeastern United States the company hopes to expand to a few hundred stores by the end of 2023. right now it's a matter of scaling up to fulfill bigger purchase orders in 2022 the company built the world's largest commercial mycelium Farm in Green Island New York if the CEO has his way that will be the last one they ever need we never want to build another mushroom farm we want to go to mushroom farmers and say hey we have a better crop for you we can pay you a higher price per pound and you can turn your rooms faster and they're still looking for new ways to use mycelium like replacing the plastic hidden in your clothing ecovative has partnered with Echo leather a sustainable leather Tannery to make products like these so this is what our mycelium looks like when it's harvested and this is just untreated totally pure mycelium it's soft it's squishy feels great on your face we're finding there's lots of customers that would like to use this in sneakers and bra cups and in bags as a plastic replacement for now ecovative design is a long way from displacing meat and Plastics but Evan says his company is finally in a position to properly scale its work I've been working 17 years to get to this point and like now the rubber meets the road across the pond several companies grow food using garbage these oyster mushrooms go from seller to Table in about two months they grow fast in used coffee grounds a rich source of carbon and nitrogen and just a petite to use it more than a few minutes to drink a coffee a Belgian company called permafangy found a way to give coffee grounds a second life is instead of letting grounds wind up in a landfill Julian's team collects them uses them to grow mushrooms and then sells the mushrooms to local shops and restaurants and now they're using wood waste and mushroom spores to make insulation panels workers from permafangy head out by bike to pick up excess coffee grounds from coffee shops around their City foreign the grounds were brought back to the underground growing facility they're mixed with other ingredients inside this giant drum s is favorite then they're packaged into bags with straw to create a nutritious soil for the mushroom spores is after about two weeks in a dark damp room the bags are brought to a brighter space where the mushrooms begin to sprout mushrooms are some of the fastest growing Foods on the planet they don't require sunlight to grow just a substrate and moisture permafungi has been using coffee grounds since 2013. up to 2 000 kilograms of mushrooms grow here every month once they're harvested the team delivers the mushrooms to local restaurants it's a circular process in which byproducts are reused rather than wasted uh [Music] Perma fungi's operation has Global potential every year coffee drinkers around the world generate about 18 million metric tons of used grounds every year the company recycles about 20 of those tons it's also figured out a way to make biodegradable insulation and packing material when we grow mushroom at the end of the production we do produce a lot of organic waste and tid with this new line of production was to reuse our own waste across the border in Paris one michelin-starred Chef is also repurposing used grounds Avec marketing champion gets his mushrooms from lebrate Champagne a local startup that recycles coffee grounds and wooden Packaging Edition on a typical day the company collects about 2 000 kilograms of grounds from offices around Paris including the Upper House of the French Parliament the mushrooms are available in restaurants and a few major Supermarket chains the company also sells grow your own mushroom kits online for our null this system is a return to Old practices it's all about re-establishing natural cycles this coffin is alive thank you it's made from mushrooms that soak up the toxins human bodies leave behind and it eliminates the need for massive amounts of wood steel and concrete used to bury the dead funerals in the U.S use enough of these materials every year to build a tower of caskets the size of the Empire State Building the loop coffin grows in a lab in seven days and absorbs into the soil in under two months but can it replace traditional burials we visited the creator of the world's first mushroom coffin to find out this is definitely my baby yes I think about it when I wake up I think about it when I go to sleep yeah I see them we got some friends Bob Hendricks searches for the building blocks for a loop coffin in Delhi hope forest in the Netherlands it's easy to find mushrooms but it's hard to find the specific one you need some are edible but some might kill you as well aha he Harvest samples to bring back to the lab every weekend this is not the one we use but we could make a coffin out of it we can try this one might be the Holy Grail here you can see all the wires so it's almost like veins of the organism it's mycelium like fibers that grow easily on all kinds of surfaces my ceiling is the root structure of mushrooms and simply said they're just the Recyclers of nature so everything that turns into death they turn it into life it feeds feeds on plants and animals expanding at a rate of half an inch per day from this little piece of mycelium we can grow a living cotton really yeah back at Loops headquarters Bob and his team mix the mycelium with wet sawdust and spray it with a secret sauce that helps it grow then they seal it in a plastic mold shaped like a coffin this part of the process is also a secret fungus fills in the empty space and it dries within a week it's a building technique that Bob has been experimenting with for years right now we tend to work with dead materials while Envision a world in which we work together with organisms the final product is light but sturdy it's almost like a sort of Styrofoam material so it's really rigid yet it's super lightweight it can carry up to 440 pounds each coffin is lined with a layer of moss sourced from a local Farm the Moss has two functions and that it helps to decompose the body faster and rich in biodiversity and the other one is to give humans the experience of becoming part of the cycle of Life a body interned in a loop coffin should not be embalmed or wear any synthetic materials so it can transform into soil faster most people's deaths leave a much larger footprint a conventionally buried body contains a mix of over 200 chemicals from tobacco residues to dry cleaning chemicals pesticides heavy metals and embalming fluids it can take up to 12 years for an embalmed body to turn into a skeleton but soft tissues release toxic chemicals and microbes after only a few months and traditional coffins contain preservatives paint and have metal handles all of these substances can leach into Soil and Water making it unhealthy for the living Loop coffins can fix this because of a process called micro remediation that means that mushrooms will Chow Down on almost anything even pollution fungi of course can have a lot of intake of heavy metals and all kind of chemical components because they they store it in their hifa in their in the fungus poly but breaking all habits can be difficult replacing bodily fluids with preservatives started during the American Civil War the bodies of Fallen Soldiers needed to be transported long distances for burial embalming made it possible for President Lincoln's open casket to remain on display for a three-week train trip from Washington to Illinois and it has been standard practice ever since Bob wants people to return to the Natural practices that existed for most of history as humans why are we not part of the cycle and we can actually enable people to feed the Earth instead of polluted Loops off to a modest start but globally green funerals are becoming more popular people are really interested in new things in a funeral business and our members are asking if they can use the loop coffin for their burial today they make up a small proportion of overall funerals but two in three American consumers say they'd consider a green burial and they have a growing list of over 300 providers to choose from given enough time we all return to dust but Bob Hendricks hopes will choose instead to become compost mushrooms are definitely having a moment but we might only be getting a glimpse of our fungal future I would say there's like a Gold Rush going on in terms of folks getting into the mycelium sector reminds me a little bit of like the Industrial Revolution in the 1900s because like everyone's trying all these different approaches to like solve the same problems hi this is Daniel Allen from the world wide waste team we want to bring you more stories that take a look at garbage and the creative ways that people deal with it if you enjoyed this video please like And subscribe we also read all the comments if you have an idea for a video you'd like to see let us know you just watched excerpts from some stories we've done about mushrooms click here for the full episodes

Channel: Business Insider

Views: 1,672,781

Keywords: Business Insider, World Wide Waste, Mushrooms, Fungi, Startups, Environmentalism, Sustainability, Technology & Science, Technology & Design

Id: dtZehr9KsmM

Length: 17min 5sec (1025 seconds)

Published: Fri Mar 10 2023