A Note from Hope Katz Gibbs, publisher, BeInkandescent Health & Wellness magazine — “From bricks to furniture to leather, mushrooms can be made into a wide variety of materials,” insists Philip Ross, an artist and lecturer at Stanford Unversity.
What a fascinating concept. As we embark on creating the first Inkandescent Health & Wellness Retreat Center here in Las Cruces, NM, in 2021, we are on the lookout for environmentally-friendly products that are sustainable, sturdy, and fabulously innovative. Why not build our structures out of mushrooms?
Of course, we need to know more. So we reached out to Philip, the founder of the San Fransisco-based start-up MycoWorks, which aims to fashion fungus into environmentally friendly clothing or structures in a fraction of the time and energy it takes when using traditional materials.
Philip has focused his research on quick-growing mycelia — cultivating, drying, and developing them as a potential building material. He believes that pound for pound, they can be stronger than concrete.
The reason: The extensive, tangled network of rootlike fibers that grow beneath the ground becomes an excellent raw material for various constructions when they are dried. In fact, these bricks are not only super strong, fire-resistant, mold, and water-resistant.
“I’ve done a ton of engineering tests this past year as part of the patent process to figure out what makes fungi grow stronger or not.
“And to all accounts, it seems like you can use this process in a host of different applications, ranging from the more pedestrian things like furniture or building materials but even up to such far-out applications as growing fungal shapes to grow human organs within or organic batteries or even computers.
“So it can become a lot of things. It’s sort of like a plastic that can potentially be used for God knows what,” Ross said in an interview.
Click here to learn more: www.mycoworks.com.