How mushrooms are saving the world as we know it
The long relationship between humans and the fungal kingdom has often been fraught. As nature’s decomposers, fungi are associated with decay in the ecological cycle. In humans’ everyday lives, they are most commonly encountered as harmful black moulds, on furry unidentified pieces of food found at the back of the fridge or in the form of fungal infections on the body. Found in the wild, there are valid concerns about their potential toxicity, and they cannot escape being sometimes associated with tripping hippies.
Distinct from the plant family due to fundamental biological differences, fungi are a fairly mysterious realm largely waiting to be discovered; only a small fraction of the estimated 2.2 to 3.8 million species on Earth have ever been described. Mycology is the name for the study of mushrooms and fungi, and a term for negative attitudes toward them is called mycophobia. They tend to be polarising, and attract a cult following of loyal mycologists, some of whom travel long distances to attend conventions and workshops.
What we are now learning is that mushrooms may have properties that could make them an essential part of the sustainable solutions we develop to save and protect the planet.
Meat substitutes
Mushrooms have an impressively low environmental impact and serve as an alternative to more environmentally damaging food choices. They require hardly any land to raise, curbing pressure on finite agricultural land, and can be produced using waste organic matter that is being discarded by other industries.
According to figures from the Mushroom Council in the US, growing them requires 2.2 kilowatt-hours of energy and 15 litres of water per kilo. This compares very favourably with 15,000 litres per kilo of beef, even though both foods are nutritionally significantly different. Despite generally being low in protein, mushrooms are rich in vitamins and minerals, including copper, niacin (vitamin B3), pantothenic acid (vitamin B5), potassium, phosphorus and iron.
A growing human population is prompting questions about where food can be sourced from in the future without further damage to ecosystems. Animal agriculture is one of the world’s largest emitters of greenhouse emissions, prompting intensive research into substitutes. In recent years, the food industry has evolved far beyond the humble veggie burger into plant-based synthetic alternatives that more closely mimic the taste and texture of real meat, and whose market share is growing fairly quickly. The downside for health freaks is their tendency to be highly processed, and in the case of the Impossible Burger, two GM soya ingredients.
Meanwhile, other similar products made from fungi are being developed. Mycelium is the part of a mushroom that resembles the roots of a plant, comprising thread-like strands known as hyphae. It is increasingly being grown and used for meat-like alternatives.
Meati Foods is the brand name of Emergy Foods, a Boulder, Colorado-based synthetic meat company using fungal mycelium. It makes pink-coloured steak and chicken-breast substitutes with a strong resemblance to real meat, imitating muscle tissue. The company claims that its product uses 99 per cent less water and emits 99 per cent less carbon than animal meats. In 2020, its products were given a low-profile launch in some Boulder-area restaurants in order to gauge customer feedback, which turned out to be encouraging.
Another American company working with mycelium-based synthetic meat is the Atlast Food Co., a division of the New York-based fungal product specialist Ecovative Design. Its first product is MyBacon, which went through a lot of trial and error to make it taste like real bacon. MyBacon is relatively high in protein, and as with Meati Foods products, it is non-GMO.
Made from mushrooms
Given its versatility and fast growth, mycelium is also being used as raw material to create a wide range of sustainable cutting-edge products, to replace far more polluting conventional materials including plastic. It has the important advantages of being renewable and compostable. Unlike most products labelled “compostable”, which require commercial composting facilities to break down, fungal products are usually home compostable.
To bypass traditional moulding, mycelium can be grown into the complex forms that it will eventually be used for, or can be shaped after processing. And unlike some eco-solutions, mycelium manufacturing can be scaled up to a level at which it could make serious inroads into the global economy.
A couple of companies stand out for the wide range of applications for which they intend to use fungi. Fungus Sapiens is a company based in the south of France, and is part of the Organic Valley circular economy project. It produces mushroom biomaterials and enzymes that can be used in a wide range of end uses, and also offers consultancy and training. Planned end uses include packaging, insulation, flotation devices, fabric, leather and shoes.
Another major player is Ecovative Design, a comparatively large company with an interest in expanding into numerous different fields. In order to achieve this, it owns more than 40 patents in 30 countries. Ecovative is working through a few licensee manufacturers, one of which is BioFab, based near Auckland in New Zealand, whose focus is custom-made products for clients.
Fungal fashion
The environmental impact of the fashion sector is huge, and if footwear is added, it is estimated to represent an astounding 10 per cent of global greenhouse emissions. It is also one of the world’s most polluting industries, especially where water is concerned. Mushrooms are coming to the rescue in the shape of vegan leather and also via a unique type of textile.
Aniela Hoitink is a Dutch woman whose fashion experiments resulted in the creation of a material called MycoTEX. This was launched at the start of 2021, and she is currently looking for corporate partners. The unique design of MycoTEX often involves layered thin circles of mycelium. Compared to regular textiles, she claims that water demand is cut by 99.5 per cent. Its main downside is that garments last for about one or two years before deteriorating and starting to fall apart. They are compostable if buried in the ground after use.
Animal leather is an ideal choice for substitution due to its oversized ecological footprint. In addition to greenhouse emissions, this can extend to tropical deforestation and the use of toxic tanning chemicals. Conventional synthetic leather alternatives are better, but being made from plastic, they have environmental downsides of their own. Mycelium leather is a very sustainable newcomer.
Among the different mycelium leather projects are:
- Mylea, a product made by Mycotech, a company based in Indonesia. It was inspired by tempeh, the food involving fermented soya beans that have been colonised by fungus.
- MuSkin, a unique type of leather with a suede feel, made from the large Phellinus ellipsoideus mushroom found in the Chinese subtropics. It is manufactured by the Italian company Grado Zero Innovation (Zero Degrees Innovation), and can be purchased in samples and small production amounts.
- Bolt Threads, an American company making a leather product called Mylo. It recently signed deals with Adidas and Stella McCartney to use Mylo for footwear, clothing and accessories. Stella McCartney’s first Mylo products were a bustier and trousers, made as an experiment rather than being sold. The first Mylo products are expected to become available in 2021.
- The US company MycoWorks, which produces commercial quantities of a leather alternative known as Reishi, named after a particular mushroom species. Hermès uses Reishi for its Victoria bag, which also has chrome-tanned calfskin among the ingredients. MycoWorks claims that Reishi is carbon-negative, storing more carbon than is released as a result of its production.
- Ecovative Design, which makes a type of leather under the name MycoFlex.
Perhaps surprisingly, these end products often have a similar strength to real leather. At present, the main drawback of fungal leather and clothing is its boutique prices. However, there is scope to scale up significantly, reducing the price and bringing mushroom leather within reach of the average consumer.
Mushroom manufacturing
Mycelium is proving to be very useful for a range of consumer products, including:
- Packaging. As a lower-impact alternative to cardboard, plastic and polystyrene, Ecovative has created MycoComposite, made from a mixture of mycelium and hemp compost. As the mycelium consumes the compost, it moulds it into the desired shape. Among companies that are using it for their products are IKEA and Dell.
- Foam. Ecovative makes foams under its MycoFlex brand name, which are breathable and water-repellent. They can be used for glove liners, backpack straps, insulated jackets, footwear and home insulation and in the skincare industry.
- Furnishings. This ranges from Ecovative’s office chair and desks, to mycelium lampshades made by Danielle Trofe. Other earlier efforts produced as one-offs were Jonas Edvard’s “Myx” chair and lampshade, and Eric Klarenbeek’s 3D-printed chair.
- Home construction. While the colonisation of Mars is a controversial idea, if it were to go ahead building materials would have to be transported to the planet. Mycelium is ideal because it can be grown on site in a closed environment. NASA is running a myco-architecture research program in California.
- Bricks. While fungal bricks are a weird notion, they are also a thing, and are being made by Ecovative. In 2014, at the New York Museum of Modern Art, a 12-metre tall tower of mycelium bricks was put on public display. While far less strong than regular bricks, they are also much lighter, and are suited to non-load-bearing end uses.
- Construction board. A few years ago, Ecovative was producing MycoBoard, a sustainable alternative to engineered boards that contain toxic formaldehyde. However this product is currently unavailable.
Decontaminating the environment
One of the most promising environmental uses of fungi is in cleaning up various types of toxic contamination at polluted sites, through what is known as mycoremediation. The conventional way of tackling this is to remove contaminated soil and then incinerate it. However this has the downside of destroying potentially fertile soil. Fungi can both clean up toxic sites and improve their fertility.
Mycoremediation involves harnessing mushrooms’ powerful decomposing abilities. Fungi can clean heavy metals from water and tackle pesticide and herbicide contamination, and some have been found to even break down plastic. They can handle a high level of toxicity that would harm other plants. Remarkably, edible mushrooms used in mycoremediation are generally safe to eat.
This field is still in a trial and error phase, and has to a degree been held back by the lack of profit to be made in utilising non-patentable fungi. Among recent examples of mycoremediation work:
After the Californian fires in October 2017, toxic ash from the burning of items such as plastics and electronics was at risk of polluting the environment. A group called the Fire Remediation Action Coalition filled dozens of kilometres worth of tubes with straw inoculated with edible oyster mushrooms, which are a mycoremediation favourite. These were designed to prevent toxic runoff.
PCBs and dioxins are known to pollute the Spokane River in Washington State. A coalition of interest groups and local government created the Spokane River Regional Toxics Task Force in 2006, which has carried out experiments in jars to test the effectiveness of fungi in tackling the problem.
Also in Washington State, the authorities were faced with an maintenance yard in the city of Bellingham contaminated with petroleum hydrocarbons. A 1998 experiment found that the most effective mushroom dramatically reduced the oil contamination of soil from 20,000 parts per million (ppm) to 200 ppm.
In 2012, students from Yale University discovered a fungal species (Pestalotiopsis microspore) in Ecuador that was later found to break down polyurethane, and even do this in an anaerobic oxygen-free environment. This species could be used successfully in landfills.
Mushrooms can even be used for nuclear contamination. In this case, they do not neutralise the radiation, but absorb it from the surrounding environment so that it can be more easily managed. US disaster expert Eric Rasmussen has been working with celebrated American mycologist Paul Stamets on looking at ways to decontaminate the area around Fukushima in Japan, with a specific focus on caesium-137.