Gavin McIntyre and Eben Bayer are co-inventor of a process that grows all-natural substitutes for plastic from the tissue of mushrooms. They say they want to be the Dow or DuPont of this century, and to do it, they have created a company called Ecovative, which is mainly build on Mushroom® packaging, a cost-competitive alternative to Styrofoam™. The company wants to go beyond simple 'triple bottom line' to "building a business that is not just sustainable, but actually makes the planet a better place for all organisms on Earth."
The company explains: We don't manufacture these materials, we grow them. We grow them from agricultural byproducts and mycelium, a fungal network of threadlike cells. It's like the "roots" of mushrooms. In 5 – 7 days, in the dark, with no watering, and no petrochemical inputs, the mycelium digests the agricultural byproducts, binding them into a beautiful structural material. The mycelium acts like a natural, self assembling glue.
This technology is a radical departure from traditional bioplastics. While feedstocks for bioplastics are typically food crops, Ecovative are able to upcycle very low value waste products. They utilize materials that are environmentally low-impact, 100 percent biodegradable and renewable, and are part of a healthy ecosystem. Unlike other bio-plastics, their technology isn't based on turning food or fuel crops into materials; they're only using inedible crop waste to grow our products. The final biodegradable materials we produce have a variety of end-of-life options, including home composting.
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