Kind: captions
Language: en
foamed polystyrene or styrofoam as we
usually call it is found in cups takeout
containers and lots of packaging it's a
plastic that's made from petroleum or
natural gas this prolific material is
incredibly stable and takes a long time
to break down perhaps hundreds of years
no one's quite sure causing a serious
trash problem but Ean Bayer has an idea
for how to solve it
he's co-founded a company called
ecovative which produces eco-friendly
packaging and it's not made from
petroleum it's grown from part of a
mushroom making stuff host David POG
visited him at his Factory in Upstate
New York well what's really unique about
the the mushrooms is they have something
a root structure uh called melum and if
you look here this is actually uh melum
in progress that we we've dug up from a
wood ship pile and you can see it forms
these strands so so this is coming from
the
yeah this it's like it's root melium is
made up of threadlike cells called hyy
that provide structure bind materials
and digest organic waste in nature it
serves a vital role in the ecosystem
breaking these materials down into
simple nutrients but at ecovative adding
products like rice husks and cotton seed
holes to the melium is the start of
turning these waste products into
natural packaging materials how does the
mushroom enter into all this well well
basically the mushroom is the glue that
holds this together and this is also the
food for the mushroom so they sort of
meld into a single composite I see so
this is these are the bricks and the the
mushroom roots are the the glue that
hold them together exactly it's the
mortar they mix the waist with mushroom
mycelium and let it grow for a few days
then they break it up into smaller
particles that will be molded into
packaging over the next few days the
mycelium will feed off the organic waste
binding it into a solid
finally the piece of packaging is popped
out of the mold and treated with heat to
kill the mushrooms so they stop
growing right now the focus is on
packaging but they're also making
biodegradable Marine buoys and that
might be just the start etive is also
exploring what you might call M
struction so we're actually using the
living material as insulation in these
walls and as the structural material
there's no no Nails no nothing it's all
glued together with I so all the way up
through the roof we we blew in that
living material you played with earlier
and it glued the whole building together
etive materials have a lot going for
them as packaging they about equal
polystyrene in cost and performance and
they can break down in a compost pile in
as little as 30 days in a landfill they
take longer about the same amount of
time as other natural
materials one consideration is weight no
mushroom material weighs as little as
the lightest
styrofoam still companies as big as Dell
computer and kraton Barrel have taken
some orders this could make a real dent
in the way we do things and the way we
discard things but are you big enough to
make even a percent of a percent
difference today um we are not but the
vision behind this is make it cost
competitive make it technically
competitive then it's an economic
proposition and our secret goal here at
equative is we want to get rid of uh
disposable Plastics
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