Mushroom Materials for Insulation and Packaging

I've toured Ecovative's facility and it's very interesting!

You can read more here and here.

That's great you got to tour their facility, SavvyExaca! I just read your blog entry and appreciated your mention of the chalkboard wall and LEGO castle. The company culture at Ecovative Design seems energetic and innovative. Are most of the employees recent college graduates? Also, during your tour, did you get to handle any of the mushroom materials?

There were just a handful of employees there when I visited, but yes, I'd say that many were recent graduates.

Our tour was a walk through of the process from when the materials come into the facility to the curing of the finished materials. I didn't handle any of the raw materials but I did see the growth and shaping in process. At the end I handled many finished products. Some are dry while others have an almost velvety texture which is very interesting. I can see how that would add additional protection as a packaging material.

How do they stop mushroom growth reactivating? Mushroms are fungi and are extremely hard to kill, a few live spores and your mushroom insulation panel will destroy the building where it is installed. (See dry rot)

Great questions, as always, from the CR4 community. They weren't ones I could answer, so I called Ecovative Design this afternoon. Here's what I learned.

Mushrooms can reproduce via spores or via mycelium. Ecovative Design uses the latter method and then terminates the mushroom's reproduction process before spores have a chance to form. (Spores form during a latter stage of a mushroom's growth process; Ecovative Designs halts mushroom growth after just a few days.)

As it was explained to me, the mycelium method is a bit like cloning. You break the mycelium in half, feed each half, and then have two mycelium that are as large as the original.

Thank you for your answer, in theory it should dispel my concerns. But... what quality controls are in place to ensure that the mycelium is is only grown for the correct time, and is there any test that can check for the presence of spores?

My wife is qualified as a virologist and used to work in a laboratory that produced virus vaccines. This was a highly controlled and regulated pharmaceutical environment. The manufacturing process involves injecting small amounts of the live virus into hens eggs that are then incubated to just before hatching. The eggs are harvested and the small amount of virus having multiplied exponentially, was sent for attenuation (killing it in a way that keeps enough properties to trigger an immune response while not generating the disease). So far analogous to the fungi growing process.

Occasionally I would have to drive my wife into the lab in the middle of the night because security had reported hearing the noise of young chicks squawking from within one of the production cells. The incubation had been mistimed and the eggs had hatched so there would be hundreds of chicks all infected with some deadly disease running around the lab. (the labs were designed with air locks and run at negative pressure so none of the virus could be released into the environment) She had to suit up, go into the lab, collect all the chicks, gas them and lock down the lab so that it could be disinfected. Locking down the lab would also mean that more chicks would hatch while awaiting sanitisation, so typically it would be out of production for a very expensive 1-2 weeks. If this sort of accident can happen through human error once or twice per year in a negative pressure highly regulated pseudo-medical facility, what chance of the same type of accident in an unregulated commercial environment where small numbers of spores if they develop cannot be seen and may not be detectable?

When I toured Ecovative I saw that they did have a controlled environment for experimenting with things. Suits/masks were required there.

As far as halting spore growth, all of the pieces undergo heat treatment at the end of the process to ensure growth is halted.

What effect would these material have on a person who is Mushroom or Fungus Allergic- in a car this could be dangerous- please advise

Thank you for your comment, Hugh Sutherland. With regard to mushrooms and inhalation allergies, it's the spores that are the problem. So if no spores are present, then there is no allergen from the mushroom material.