Key Points
- Mycelium offers fully biodegradable alternatives across packaging, fashion, and building, but cost parity with plastics needs scale and time.
- Leather-like sheets can be made with zero plastics; some brands still use limited additives to hit durability specs.
- Two producers currently reach hundreds of thousands of packaging units/month; still tiny versus ~12 Mt/year polystyrene.
- High-profile setbacks (e.g., paused projects) don’t indict the field; others are scaling with new plants and jobs.
- Biggest untapped win may be below ground: fungi boost soil carbon (glomalin), resilience, and bioremediation potential.
Full interview with Mycostories
Can you explain how fungi as biomaterials can be used to address the ecological challenges we face today?
When we talk about fungi in biomaterials, we're mostly talking about mycelium, which is the root structure of fungi, and it can be grown in an eco-friendly way which represents a promising revolution for mycelium-based materials.
Only 10% of our packaging is recycled globally, so there's a huge opportunity to develop a fully biodegradable material. There is an increasing number of companies that are leveraging the properties of mycelium to create alternative, sustainable packaging products. Ecovative is one of the early pioneers, but many new players are entering this field in Europe, Latin America, and Asia.
In addition, several companies are creating interesting uses for mycelium-based composites, such as creating sustainable beehives, canoes, or protective habitats for animals in forest fires.
Examples can also be found in the fashion industry. One example is a mycelium-based alternative to leather, which is currently gaining popularity. A company called MycoWorks in the US launched the world's largest mycelium material plant a year ago, being the first company globally to take this technology and bring it to scale. Other startups are surfing the wave of consumers looking for cruelty-free and potentially more environmentally friendly-produced alternative leather materials, as the carbon footprint and water usage of traditional leather production is far higher, up to 90% than the mycelium-based equivalent.
Worth noting are other applications of fungi in the fashion industry, such as fungal-based inks and fabric dyes. A designer called Jesse Adler recently launched Pitri, a company hoping to bring fungal based, natural dyes to the cosmetics industry.
The potential of mycelium-based products extends to the construction industry as well, which has a similar process to the production process of biodegradable packaging. You can heat-press the material to make it into a fire and water-resistant composite. One example is the project MycoHab in Namibia is constructing buildings with mycelium-based material.
We're at the beginning of a material revolution, one that needs a lot more R&D testing, trial, and optimisation before scaling production effectively.
When we talk about leather from mycelium, is it still coated with plastic? Is it possible to do it without?
It is possible to make a fully sustainable leather alternative. However, companies might use finishing additives depending on the final quality of the product they are after. For instance, they might use chemical dye or natural dye.
I was working with a company in Indonesia called Mycotech Lab, where they developed a 100% mushroom-based leather product. After letting the mycelium bind to a substrate, which in this case is sawdust and bamboo waste, it creates that soft fabric, which is then tanned the way normal leather is processed and then dyed with natural dyes. Some companies in the US are using some limited chemicals to have something that can end up being more resistant.
Among all these use cases, mycelium packaging is pretty well-developed. But how does it compare to plastic packaging in terms of cost and scale?
At the moment, there's no way mycelium-based packaging can match plastic production costs at this stage. This is simply because plastic production has been in production for the last 80 years. It has been optimised by millions of engineers and produced at a monumental scale. We could match that production scale and cost if we were able to put that amount of resources into R&D and operational production facilities.
Therefore, we won't replace plastic packaging with mycelium-based composites just yet. In some cases, where products are of higher value and where it makes more sense to spend a bit more on the packaging, there is a business case to replace them.
In terms of production at scale, only two companies globally are producing in the hundreds of thousands of units a month. One of them is based in the UK, called Magical Mushroom, is in the process of building a large production plant, combining the three existing factories they run in the UK, with the objective to produce packaging at a scale and enable competitive unit cost with polystyrene. They can make hundreds of thousands of units a month, which is still a drop in the ocean if you compare it to global polystyrene packaging production, about 12 million tonnes a year. With time and more clients demanding these alternative sustainable packaging options, we’ll be able to drive the scale up and cost down.
Given Bolt Thread's media attention and subsequent production halt, what does it imply?
Bolt Thread is an interesting example. They raised over USD 200 million over the past decade and had some great brand partnerships with the likes of Adidas and Stella McCartney. They were unable to crack the operational setup of producing a high-quality product at scale. They've not given up on this, but they announced that they were going to halt production for some time. At the same time, MycoWorks launched a 130,000sq.ft. mycelium-leather production plant, employing over 350 people. Thus, it's not because one company fails that it's all doom and gloom for the whole industry. I think trial and error will give us the answers that we're looking for.
Looking at other possibilities, I'm personally most excited about how we can leverage fungi to sustain soil ecosystems. So far, we haven't fully exploited the benefits that they have in our soil, in agriculture, in forestry management projects, and in carbon sequestration projects.
Let's assess carbon sequestration as an example. There’s a lot of tilling in our industrialised agriculture processes, and this destroys the fungal ecosystem, which is a key component to storing carbon in our soils. They have a compound called glomalin, which is one of the chemical compounds that survive best in the soil and store the most carbon. Increasing fungal diversity in soil has the potential to enhance carbon sequestration and simultaneously restore soil health in areas dedicated to crop cultivation or forestry projects. You have companies like FUNGA, focusing specifically on these exciting carbon sequestration projects.
Recently, there has been some really exciting research around fungi’s enzymes being able to break down petrochemical-based molecules. This means that they can be used in bioremediation (the process of removing toxic pollutants from the soil). A company in France called Yphen or Novobiom in Belgium does this at a small scale, but it is promising for the future of environment clean-ups.
Also, mushrooms can be a great alternative to our meat-based protein in the food industry, and there are many startups in this niche. It is probably the most vibrant aspect of the fungi innovation space, with close to a hundred companies, which have been mapped out on MycoStories. The most money invested so far has been on what we call mycoprotein.
What are the three resources you would like to share with someone who is new to the fungi sphere?
MycoStories is a great platform to start where you can have a good understanding of a lot of concrete examples, but also research done in the world of biomaterials leveraging fungi.
In addition, I would check out the work and case studies that have been published by Ecovative, who hold patents on biomaterials, both in the field of leather and in the packaging space.
Finally, I recommend reading Entangled Life by Merlin Sheldrake, which helps to bring a more holistic view of the role of fungi in the development of our ecosystems.
