[Lapg] Industrial-Strength Fungus By ADAM FISHER Monday, Feb. 08, 2010 Time Magazine

[Wesley Roe and Santa Barbara Permaculture Network]

GOING GREEN
Industrial-Strength Fungus
By ADAM FISHER Monday, Feb. 08, 2010
http://www.time.com/time/magazine/article/0,9171,1957474,00.html


Fibers form a sturdy network called a mycelium.
Philip Ross

At an organic farm just outside Monterey, Calif., a super-eco 
building material is growing in dozens of darkened shipping 
containers. The farm is named Far West Fungi, and its rusting 
containers are full of all sorts of mushrooms--shiitake, reishi and 
pom-pom, to name a few. But Philip Ross, an artist, an inventor and a 
seriously obsessed amateur mycologist, isn't interested in the fancy 
caps we like to eat. What he's after are the fungi's thin, white 
rootlike fibers. Underground, they form a vast network called a 
mycelium. Far West Fungi's dirt-free hothouses pack in each mycelium 
so densely that it forms a mass of bright white spongy matter.

Mycelium doesn't taste very good, but once it's dried, it has some 
remarkable properties. It's nontoxic, fireproof and mold- and 
water-resistant, and it traps more heat than fiberglass insulation. 
It's also stronger, pound for pound, than concrete. In December, Ross 
completed what is believed to be the first structure made entirely of 
mushroom. (Sorry, the homes in the fictional Smurf village don't 
count.) The 500 bricks he grew at Far West Fungi were so sturdy that 
he destroyed many a metal file and saw blade in shaping the 'shrooms 
into an archway 6 ft. (1.8 m) high and 6 ft. wide. Dubbed 
Mycotectural Alpha, it is currently on display at a gallery in 
Germany.
Nutty as "mycotecture" sounds, Ross may be onto something bigger than 
an art project. A promising start-up named Ecovative is building a 
10,000-sq.-ft. (about 930 sq m) myco-factory in Green Island, N.Y. 
"We see this as a whole new material, a woodlike equivalent to 
plastic," says CEO Eben Bayer. The three-year-old company has been 
awarded grants from the EPA and the National Science Foundation, as 
well as the Department of Agriculture--because its mushrooms feast on 
empty seed husks from rice or cotton. "You can't even feed it to 
animals," says Bayer of this kind of agricultural waste. "It's 
basically trash."

After the husks are cooked, sprayed with water and myco-vitamins and 
seeded with mushroom spores, the mixture is poured into a mold of the 
desired shape and left to grow in a dark warehouse. A week or two 
later, the finished product is popped out and the material rendered 
biologically inert. The company's first product, a green alternative 
to Styrofoam, is taking on the packaging industry. Called Ecocradle, 
it is set to be shipped around a yet-to-be-disclosed consumer item 
this spring.

One of the beauties of Ecocradle is that unlike Styrofoam--which is 
hard to recycle, let alone biodegrade--this myco-material can easily 
serve as mulch in your garden. Ecovative's next product, Greensulate, 
will begin targeting the home-insulation market sometime next year. 
And according to Bayer's engineering tests, densely packed mycelium 
is strong enough to be used in place of wooden beams. "It's not so 
far-out," he says of Ross's art house. So could Bayer see himself 
growing a mushroom house and living in it? "Well"--he 
hesitates--"maybe we'd start with a doghouse."
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