Description:
Mushroom® Materials were inspired by the woods of Vermont as a replacement for plastic foams. Ecovative’s patented process combines agricultural byproducts with fungal mycelium, a natural, self-assembling binder, to literally grow high performance insulation. We grew a tiny house on a trailer as a radical demonstration of this technology, and this is now available for sale as a kit. The tiny house market is small but growing rapidly, and we see this as a proving ground for the $21B rigid board foam insulation market.
Rigid board insulation like extruded polystyrene is made of finite petrochemicals, and often includes high global-warming potential blowing gasses that seep out over time, lowering the aged R-value. Loose fill and batt insulation can settle, especially in a movable tiny house, which compromises effectiveness. In order to meet fire safety codes, nearly all rigid board and loose fill insulation materials are made with harsh flame retardant chemicals.
The Mushroom Tiny House has walls made of pine tongue and groove boards and hollow cavities with no studs. Within these walls, live Mushroom® Insulation is packed. In three days, the mycelium grows and solidifies these loose particles into air sealed insulation, while also adhering to the pine boards creating an extremely strong sandwich. The result is similar to a structural insulating panel (SIP); this layer of continuous insulation has no thermal bridging. Over the course of about a month, the Mushroom Insulation naturally dries and goes dormant. Mushrooms will only fruit through gaps or due to improper construction, and can be easily trimmed off with a knife before they produce spores. The Mushroom Tiny House fully embodies the Cradle to Cradle ethos.Material health: We combine corn stalks from local farms with fungal tissue from local forests and grow a biobased material that has no synthetic chemicals and emits no VOCs.
Material reutilization: Mushroom® Insulation is primarily made from corn stalks, an agricultural byproduct. Just as wood will not rot in a properly built home, Mushroom Insulation will not degrade unless it is broken up and put in a compost pile.
Renewable energy: A hydroelectric plant powers our efficient bio-production process, and we buy BEF carbon offsets for our natural gas use.
Water stewardship: Little wasted water goes down the drain from our process, and there is nothing harmful in the effluent. Unlike plants, fungi do not need to be repeatedly watered.
Social fairness: Ecovative is creating green collar jobs and we are proud to be an equal opportunity company that empowers all employees to use their full potential to make planet Earth a better place.
The cost of Mushroom® Insulation is $0.25/board foot which is comparable to SIPs and is often cheaper than studs plus loose fill or batt insulation, when labor is valued. The insulation is performance competitive at R-3/inch and has superior strength characteristics. The Mushroom Tiny House was recently unveiled to much acclaim at the first ever Tiny House Fair at the Yestermorrow Design Build School in Vermont.
Check out: This link
Great joy to hear of this radical approach! Some sorrow to hear of the conventionality of applications? Where is the ultimate, smurf-house, with adjoining rooms as in the sprayed concrete dome houses? Can I fill chambers in older houses with mushroom foam for a safer all natural re-insulation? Love the idea of an insul-board, looking for a hemp outer layer, from Canada where Hemp is a legal corp! University of Alberta built Hemp vehicle bodies – can mushrooms be used to insulate for Canadian climate (cold) electric applications? Can high “R” building blocks be cast?
I love this on so many levels. I hope you don’t mind if I reblog. If you do, let me know and I’ll remove it. 🙂
Thank you, this brightened my brainpan more than you can guess. 🙂
spread the good news.
Reblogged this on 47whitebuffalo's Blog and commented:
This has so much cool information about heat that I just have to share it! Have mushrooms ever been put to such non-culinary great use ever before? Tiny homes warmed by fungi. Yes, you too can get your very own cozy pine nest. I’m not kidding. They’re not kidding. It’s for REAL. Imagination rules when it comes to creating POSITIVE change.
admire the ingenuity of this kind of device, but anytime someone tells you that oil and gas are finite commodities or resources should be watched carefully. That’s no more the case then I am an astronaut! See: http://bit.ly/11H62og
I admire the ingenuity of this kind of device, but anytime someone tells you that oil and gas are finite commodities or resources should be watched carefully. That’s no more the case then I am an astronaut! See: http://bit.ly/11H62og
You ARE an astronaut…. you are WAY out there, Daddy-O!. Oil and gas are infinite resources? Wheeeeeee!
Seriously. If the earth was generating oil at the cubic-mile-per-year rate at which we’re consuming it, it would be leaking out everywhere and every desert would be self-paved with tar sands.
Roger, watch this almost hour-long video on Future Energy Sources, apparently The earth has tons and tons of methane hydrates, line just offshore, currently drilled through to get to the oil we use now, http://bit.ly/11H62og
Well Roger,, I am no astronaut, but it’s clear that every time you guys say that oil is declining or has already peaked in production, another field gets found. Methyl hydrate is another source/form of this oil Producers are drilling right through it now, to reach what is conventional oil. Once again, I will hold out for ColdFusion, Nuclear Energy (perhaps Thorium as the Scandinavians are testing, or traditional nuclear energy, http://nucleargreen.blogspot.com/, I hear that hydrogen is being proposed in California as a means of learning all nuclear reactors and fossil fuel plants, but I wouldn’t hold my breath,, because it involves some offshore wind farms. they are uglier than drilling platforms.
This is a great post Peter. I have to admit though that when I first saw the title, I was certain it was a metaphor for the way people who only go to denier dens for climate change information feel…..kept in the dark and fed on bullshit.
“kept in the dark and fed on bullshit” ROFL!!!
Reblogged this on uknowispeaksense.
From the perfectly-predictable-unanticipated-consequences department:
Greens and radio-phobes demand the decommissioning of the entire Fukushima Dai’ichi site, including the perfectly operable units 5 and 6.
The result? TEPCO and Mitsubishi plan to build new coal-fired capacity in Fukushima.
Like those shocked at the 2008 mortgage meltdown, you didn’t see that coming, did you?
From the perfectly-predictable-Engineer-Poet-comments department:
A comment with absolutely no relevence to the post.
I had “OT” in the first draft, but it was too distracting from the point.
Which point is, I fear I need to spell out explicitly, that all the hot air about off-shore wind turbines replacing nuclear power in Japan is just that. Wind, wave and solar cannot replace the atom even in the homeland of Sharp, and the Japanese show it through their actions even if they say otherwise.
Meanwhile, coal, railroad and port interests in the USA are rubbing their hands gleefully in the anticipation of highly profitable contracts, and China has one more example to point to as it refuses any consideration of moderation of its own GHG emissions.
Yes I’m having great difficulty understanding the Engineer-Poet’s stance in these posts. This excellent article is highlighting that there are excellent alternatives to petroleum based materials that we rely heavily on. I understand that nuclear power is a carbon emission free source of power that should not be dismissed on outdated views and maybe we should disconnect the weapon associations . But the poet seems to want to make it a compulsory source of power, always heavily criticising alternatives. Not a good salesman’s tactic at all. Whilst I understand that the poet is anti climate change denier (good for him), he should loosen up on the solutions and lighten up on the protective nuclear stance.
Mycelial webs look promising (and sequester carbon for their lifespan), though I would worry about the “properly built house” part. Houses do leak, and having a component which both bio-degrades and itself consumes cellulose (like the tongue-and-groove skins) when it gets wet has some failure modes that don’t look good for the value or even habitability of the structure.
On the other hand, as a material for e.g. vacation cabins on islands vulnerable to tsunamis or storm surges… perfect. If it gets blown down or washed away, it leaves no glass fibers or plastic bits for wildlife to get tangled in or mistake for food. If it’s too damaged to use, just set fire to it and throw up another. Better yet, run the remains of the sandwich wall through a chipper-shredder and use it as the substrate for the insulation of the next one.
Possibility for sawmills: sawdust to insulation? It’s already finely divided.
Imagine using trees downed by a hurricane to grow insulated “tents” in a few days for interim housing for those rendered homeless. There’s a raft of possibilities there.
I’m for anything that works, but that mandates criticism of non-solutions. When non-solutions fail, the fallback is always the fossil-fired status quo ante. Doubly so, when the capital that could have been used to build something that works has been wasted. (That seems to work too neatly to be an accident, doesn’t it?)
Nukes take decades to plan, force through the pseudo-democratic process (they get built where people don’t have enough political clout to stop them) and build, and then about 18 years to pay back the carbon used in their construction. So besides all the other horrible problems, for the duration of this dire crisis they are little more than a very high-carbon-producing energy sink.
If you are actually concerned about pseudo-democratic policies, you might want to lean on Harry Reid who has trampled roughshod over his Nye Co. constituents who really want Yucca Mountain to open and bring some decent jobs to their area. Oh, Reid also ran roughshod over the law, which required that the site be appraised and properly opened; even the safety reports of the NRC were withheld due to unlawful actions of his cronies.
I shouldn’t have to mention the anti-democratic nature of the special-interest “intervenors” who are able to scuttle nuclear projects no matter how much the locals like them and want them there. They’re good taxpayers, too.
Also, if you are actually concerned about carbon emissions you should be down on wind farms. Nuclear plants use far less concrete and steel per nameplate kW (let alone average kW) and pay off their invested energy in a matter of weeks. Wind farms take around half a year.
Finally, if you think nuclear takes too long to build you should be in favor of eliminating the NRC and returning to the old AEC rules. Under the AEC, plants were able to go from application to breaking ground in under a year.