We live in a world built on holmaterials that are cheap, abundant, and devastating to the planet. As you know, we here at Hell Yeah HQ are passionate about waste, having written about a company that repurposes trash into backpacks, another that enzymatically breaks down plastic, and another that uses dirt as a sustainable housing material. We are inspired by elegant, moonshot approaches that are not only scalable, but aesthetically beautiful enough to be widely accepted. This won’t be the last time we highlight solutions to this problem.

Before we get to the ‘shrooms, let’s reiterate the scale of the waste problem by focusing just on the PACKAGING industry - one of several industries that Ecovative is disrupting:

We highlight this to also bring up the utter futility of most packaging. Yes, we need to assure our face cream doesn’t shake around in the box. But the unboxing experience needs to be TikTok worthy (also super important). Then we just toss it.

Fungi are incredible. They survive in space, infect ants’ brains, and power King Gizzard concert-goers. NOTE: Please read Entangled Life by Merlin Sheldrake if you want your mind blown at how utterly fascinating fungi is.

But fungi are also pretty gross, right? They are a pizza-ruining topping for children and a date-ruining affliction for those with athlete’s foot. It’s hard to look at a mushroom and think, “yo, that would be great packaging for a luxury candle, or as lighting fixtures in a trendy Brooklyn hotel” But Eben Bayer and Gavin McIntyre (previously engineering students at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute), were inspired by how fungal mycelium binds wood chips together and started Ecovative in 2007 to do just those things.

(Here is the cool MushLume lighting)

The key lies in mycelium’s biology. Over billions of years of evolution, mycelium has learned to break down organic material and self-assemble into self-replicating, scaffolding structures. And its this resilient structure that can be used to make packaging, textiles, food, and pretty much anything.

Ecovative built a platform to grow mycelium on agricultural by-products (like straw, cotton burrs, rice hulls) in shaped molds. The mycelium digests the substrate, binds it, and grows into a composite structure. Literally growing material into shape instead of forming raw materials into shape.

From a sustainability standpoint, mycelium-based material has a lot of advantages:

✅ Biodegradable: Composts at home in 45 days

✅ Made from waste: Grows on agricultural leftovers like hemp scraps

✅ Lower carbon footprint: Can even be carbon-negative in some use-cases, and requires less energy, water, and other resources compared to traditional material manufacturing.

It’s also pretty cool from a performance perspective:

✅ Naturally fire-resistant

✅ Water resistant

✅ Durable and strong

✅ Doesn’t smell like mushrooms

Also, there are many species of mycelium that are edible and are the basis of Ecovative’s alternative meat food business, MyForest Foods. Their products are distributed in 1,400+ stores, by well known companies like Whole Foods and Good Eggs. Check out this sizzling mycelium bacon! 🥓 🍄

A growing number of large corporates are becoming fungal fans as Ecovative as partnered with groups like Ikea, Dell, Ecco Leather, PANGAIA, Reformation, and others. The company has raised over $184M including a $60M Series D led by the global hedge fund Viking Global Investors. Much of this money has been used to grow out their fashion textiles and alternative meat business. The company is set up for scale and to do sporetastic things!

As we said before, fungi are astonishing and scientists are really just starting to understand their massive complexity. Did you know that globally, the total length of fungal mycelium in the top 10cm of Earth’s soil is more than 450 quadrillion km (about half the width of our galaxy)!

But this is a story of human imagination. Similar to how Michelangelo would look at a block of stone and see the figure of a naked person, Bayer and McIntyre looked a mushroom’s root system and saw furniture packaging (again, these are the best analogies we can think of). It’s a testament to human ingenuity and our world is better for it.

What also gets our minds spinning is the concept of “growing” our materials in a ready-to-use form. We can build facilities that grow “leather”, rather than fields of grass to feed cows to slaughter and skin and send to factories to process the hides before sending to other factories to cut into shapes. It’s an entirely novel production method that’s not only more streamlined, but is ultimately what will be required to expand humanity once we use up all our inputs (see our piece about wooden satellites and growing organic structures for long-term space travel).

But most of all, we’re happy that Ecovative has shown how their product works with food, fashion, and luxury goods - aesthetic industries that need to avoid any “ick” factor. Yes, there’s charm in sustainably “doing less harm,” but there is beauty in creating items that return to the earth gracefully. And this is how alternatives ultimately get accepted by society.

Sometimes the most radical technologies are the most ancient. Fungi were here long before us, and with a little human imagination, they might just help us design our way home again.

Hell Yeah! ⚡️⚡️🍄🍄‍🟫

Ecovative’s website explains their technology, business lines, history, scale, and partnership strategy

Official Instagram account

MushLoom Lighting

“How to Grow a Mycelium Company: To tackle the problem of scaling up sustainable materials, we started working like a mushroom”

Ellen Macarthur Foundation Case Study

Vogue Business talking about leather alternatives

New Yorker article from 2013 talking about the business’ early days