ECOVATIVE
BUSINESS WINE BOX
Ecovative grows its mushroom packaging right in the mold.
they had an interesting material but they weren’t sure exactly what it was.” Ross is also the founder of MycoWorks, one of the firms developing mushroombased plastics. He learned how to cultivate mushrooms while working as a chef in the 1990s. He would take organic waste such as sawdust or corncobs, pasteurize it, inoculate it with fungal tissue, and let it set in a container to grow. The mixture became a dense material shaped like the container. With a few refinements, this is how companies manufacture mushroom materials today. The result is analogous to a polymer composite, with the mycelium as the polymer matrix and the organic material akin to fiberglass reinforcement. Initially, Ross grew reishi mushrooms for food and as an immune system stimulant. After a while, he started using them as a structural material. In 2009, he made a 200-cu-ft building for a German art exhibit. “The entire house was boiled down over the course of the exhibition and served as tea to the visitors,” he recalls. Firms developing fungus-based materials aim MycoWorks has put its material through for LARGE-SCALE MANUFACTURING the paces of professional testing. Ross has ALEXANDER H. TULLO, C&EN NORTHEAST NEWS BUREAU also tested the material’s limits himself, taking blocks of it down to a shooting range and firing .22, .38, and .45 caliber slugs into SAM HARRINGTON STOOD at the potwist on conventional biobased plastics, them at point-blank range. The .45 pendium at the Plasticity Forum in New York where for the most part, development etrated only 5 inches into the material. City this summer to preach to the environinvolves perfecting biological pathways to The unique physical properties of its mentally minded audience about Ecovative monomers that can be converted chemimaterials have prompted MycoWorks to Design’s mushroom-based plastics. While cally into polymers. explore applications such as architectural Harrington, the firm’s marketing and sales The new companies want to go straight panels. According to Ross, the materials manager, spoke, a basket containing hunks to molded “polymers” by have attracted the attention of expanded polystyrene, horseshoe crab growing the mushrooms in of the military as well as vehiO shells, and samples of his company’s matecavities of the desired shape. cle makers, who are intrigued rials passed from table to table. But finding markets for these by their sound-dampening NH HO The connection between the polymaterials and producing them and structural characteristics. O styrene foam and the mushroom plastic on a large scale are challenges “It blows me away the folks O wasn’t hard to grasp. They were of similar they still must overcome. we are talking to,” he says. OH n weight and stiffness. The most obvious difThere are a lot of shrimp, Ecovative is mostly pursuChitin ference between the two was texture. The crabs, mushrooms, and ining large markets that are mushroom plastic had a velvety feel, like sects in the world, so much so traditionally the domain of the moldy skin on a wheel of brie. that, after cellulose, chitin is said to be the commodity plastics. Chief among them is Why the crabs were there was more puzmost common biopolymer found in nature. protective packaging, where Ecovative’s zling. But Harrington explained that the Chitin is a polysaccharide. Its structure material competes with polystyrene, polyhorseshoe crab shell and the tiny, interwois similar to cellulose except that it has ethylene, and polypropylene foam. The ven strands of the mycelium—the vegetaan acetamide group instead of a hydroxyl company designs test packs especially for tive tissue of fungi—in Ecovative’s mategroup in each repeating unit. customers and then performs drop testing rial are made of the same stuff: chitin. As a material, chitin, especially in the on the packaging. For a more sustainable world, Harform of the new mushroom-based materi“Using approximately the same amount rington said, industry will need to exploit als, is relatively unexplored. “It is unclear, of material, we’re generally able to match gprocesses found in nature. “How could we exactly, what the best application of this levels seen in those packs,” says Eben Baymake a fork the way the horseshoe crab material is going to be,” says Philip Gorer, the company’s chief executive officer. grows its exoskeleton?” he asked. don Ross, assistant professor of art at the Ecovative has enjoyed the most success That’s the goal of a handful of compaUniversity of San Francisco. “It is like the competing against polyethylene foam, a nies developing mushroom plastics. It’s a early days of plastics, when people knew high-end material used largely for packag-
MAKING IT WITH MUSHROOMS
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ing electronic devices. “That has been our sweet spot in the market,” Bayer says, in part because polyethylene foam is more expensive than other plastics, he adds. Ecovative boasts the computer maker Dell as a client. The company has a big-time partner in the protective packaging giant Sealed Air. The firm, famous for Bubble Wrap, licensed Ecovative’s technology and applied it in a 30,000-sq-ft factory in Cedar Rapids, Iowa. Ecovative supplies the needed agricultural waste feedstock and the mycelium tissue to Sealed Air, which is making standardized protective packaging shapes. Another deep-pocketed Ecovative backer is 3M, which participated in a $14 million venture capital investment round late last year.
crystallize. This was subsequently fixed with better nucleating agents. Narayan doubts the days of process time to make the mushroom plastics can be similarly improved to acceptable levels. “The concept of actually growing stuff into a product, just in terms of the time and capital required to reach large volumes, is not tenable,” he argues.
It’s Ecovative’s intention to be more than an appealing story. The firm is staking its future on high volumes made at competitive prices. “It has become very clear to us that, in general, for mass-market products people are willing to pay very little extra, if anything, for sustainability benefits alone,” Harrington says. “Our goal here is not just to create an econiche product.” ◾
LIKE MYCOWORKS, Ecovative is explor-
ing structural uses for its material. One is as a replacement for polyisocyanurate and polystyrene foam insulation. Its mushroom plastic material has an insulation value similar to polystyrene, Harrington tells C&EN, and a class A fire resistance rating, which comes naturally without the need for brominated flame retardants. Another potential application is engineered lumber in which slabs of mushroom material can be pressed into boards. But the company has more than material properties to worry about: Ecovative’s executives often get questions about processing time. After the agricultural waste material is inoculated with the mycelium, it needs to sit in a shaping mold for 96 hours while it grows into a finished part. Processing time in the plastics industry is generally measured in seconds or minutes. Harrington coyly responds that mushroom parts can be produced a thousand times faster than cardboard and millions of times faster than plastics. “You have to grow the trees first, or you have to wait for the oil to form over 65 million years,” he says. “When you do your economic sensitivity analysis, it ends up not being that much of a factor,” Bayer adds, noting that the company has brought the processing time down from 14 days when it was founded in 2007. Mushroom plastics are an “appealing story,” acknowledges Ramani Narayan, a professor of chemical engineering at Michigan State University who specializes in biobased plastics, but he calls the long processing time a “fatal flaw.” He draws a comparison to polylactic acid, a bioplastic that struggled in its early years in part because it needed minutes of residence times in molds to
aris at CPhI P See you 2 oth 5R 1 hall 5, bo
Of course we are happy about every goal. And every sharp LCD screen. Football without fans? Impossible. Just like the production of liquid crystals without our Palladium catalysts would also be impossible. So, you cheer on the game and we’ll take care of the crisp, clear picture. Employee: Eliciane Silva/General Management Assistent
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