Green Heroes: How mushrooms can save the world

Zoomin English

The Dutch company uses mycelium, a type of mushroom structure to replace plastic packaging. Their goal is to one day completely replace the toxic pollutant with this organic option.

Transcript

00:00What are the advantages of plastic packaging?

00:07Think about plastics. If you look in your garbage can at home, you will see mostly plastic.

00:12Packaging made of plastics is so omnipresent, we need to get an alternative for that.

00:17And mycelium packaging is an alternative.

00:19What is your name?

00:22My name is Jan, Jan Berbet, and I'm one of the co-founders of Grown Bio.

00:28My name is Arte Marais, I'm also the co-founder of Grown Bio.

00:31And Grown Bio is a company that literally does what it says, we grow products.

00:36It started five years ago.

00:38We were working in a project with a customer who was looking for packaging for mushrooms.

00:43And I read the word mushroom packaging somewhere, so I thought that is my answer.

00:47But my search led me to a company in New York called Ecovative.

00:52That can actually make packaging made of mushrooms and not packaging for mushrooms.

00:56The main ingredient of our products is mycelium.

00:59And mycelium is the root structure of a mushroom.

01:02The products we grow have very nice characteristics.

01:07They are lightweight, they have high insulation properties, they are strong and the end of life is super.

01:15You can compost them.

01:17Welcome to our factory. Let me give you a tour around.

01:22It all starts with the raw material.

01:24When we put the spores of the fungus into the raw material, it immediately starts growing.

01:31So therefore we had for another step, we designed the packaging to match the product it should protect.

01:42Next is growing it.

01:44We fill the molds with the material and then we put it in our special growing chambers.

01:49Where there is a nice climate, it's nice humidity, nice temperature.

01:53And the fungus starts to glue all that agricultural waste together in the shape we want.

01:59Then we have to stop the process because the fungus will eat everything away.

02:05And then we have no product anymore.

02:07So therefore we stop the process by drying it.

02:12After two days of growth, we are going to get it out of the tool.

02:16I'll show you.

02:20Growing mycelium products takes a week.

02:22And in our factory, currently we make 10,000 products a week.

02:26But the raw material of mycelium products is almost endless.

02:31Compare that to the oil we need for making plastics.

02:34Well, we all know it's limited.

02:37This year only, we already replaced 250,000 products of plastic by our mycelium products.

02:45Currently we make packaging, but we could also make insulation panels for houses.

02:49So we see different products coming from mycelium.

02:53We believe that we will replace traditional plastic products by mycelium and organic waste products more on a global scale.

03:01This product can be used anywhere in the world because anywhere in the world there is organic waste to be reused.

Category

Transcript

Recommended