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This article was taken from the February 2012 issue of Wired magazine. Be the first to read Wired's articles in print before they're posted online, and get your hands on loads of additional content by subscribing online.
Eben Bayer is on a mission: he wants simply to eradicate the polystyrene packaging industry. The trouble with 1-phenylethane-1,2-diyl, as the resourceful 26-year-old entrepreneur from Vermont sees it, is that, as no known microorganism can biodegrade it, it pollutes the oceans and clutters landfills -- making up around 30 per cent of US landfills alone, according to some estimates. In the 173 years since Eduard Simon first produced polystyrene, it has become a highly lucrative by-product of the oil industry, made using a liquid hydrocarbon derived from petroleum in a process that creates millions of tonnes a year. But Bayer has a plan to change all that.
His plan involves replacing polystyrene with mushrooms. By combining fungus with agricultural waste to create packaging that's cheap, durable and biodegradable, Bayer hopes to disrupt an environmentally destructive industry valued globally at around $20 billion (£13 billion). It's an enormous ambition, certainly -- but his startup, Ecovative Design, has already made powerful friends. Honoured as a tech pioneer at the World Economic Forum in Davos, it has attracted millions in grant money from the US Environmental Protection Agency, the National Science Foundation and the US Department of Agriculture, plus private investment from the likes of 3M and RPI.
Bayer is not a typical psilocybin enthusiast. With his patrician good looks and tall, lean build, he could easily pass for a professional tennis player. He greetsvisitors with a hearty handshake. Ecovative is housed in a commercial complex overlooking the dilapidated grounds of the local power authority in the town of Green Island, 16km from the Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute campus in upstate New York, where he studied and founded the business four years ago.
It seems like a strange place for a startup, but it's appropriate: Ecovative has far more in common with its industrial-era neighbours -- the red-brick Honeywell factory down the road -- than it does with the high-growth new businesses of Silicon Valley. What Bayer is proposing is a manufacturing business -- a foam-packaging empire powered by mushroom spores.
Bayer likes to call polystyrene "the toxic white stuff".
Standing at the first stage of Ecovative's production line, he points out that every 0.02 cubic metres of polystyrene requires a litre and a half of petroleum to manufacture. "This is where a huge vat of oil would be," he says, grinning.
The Ecovative process begins instead with agricultural waste.
The three stainless-steel hoppers towering in front of Bayer contain cotton burrs, rice hulls and buckwheat hulls -- post-harvest chaff. The straw-coloured material is released on to a conveyer belt, which channels it through a steam cleaner to eliminate mould, bacteria and insects. The mixture is then impregnated with spores of mycelium, the thread-like vegetative part of fungus. Two women in hospital gowns and rubber gloves, heads shrouded in sterile caps, catch the bristly stew in plastic moulds. At this point, the moulds resemble the foam caps used to cushion computer servers in transit. Other versions mimic the cocoons used to safeguard bottles of wine or the corner braces of office furniture.
They're then placed in steel racks similar to those found at a bakery. This is where the mycelium starts to work. "It excretes compounds into the agricultural waste -- that's how it breaks down cellulose," Bayer explains. "It pulls in the cellulose, digests it and turns it into a polymer. What we do is use the organism as glue; a living glue that grows into every nook and cranny."
Over the next five days, as the mixture steeps, the mycelium will consume most of the organic material, or substrate, enveloping the leftovers in tiny filaments a fraction of the width of a human hair. When popped from the mould, the product looks like a chunk of white chocolate with almond flecks inside it. It's soft to the touch, like a mushroom, but exceptionally sturdy. By altering the substrate mixture, Gavin McIntyre -- the company's chief scientist and Bayer's business partner -- can adjust the strength and flexibility of the foam. More cotton burrs increase the thermal dynamic, more rice hulls makes it more fire-retardant. "You can hit it with a blowtorch," McIntyre says. "And it doesn't burn."
Each cubic centimetre of EcoCradle foam contains some 4.8km of mycelium fibre, all created without a single unit of energy. "This organism is not a picky eater," says Bayer. "We can use almost any lignose-cellulosic waste as a substrate."
That includes sawdust, hemp core, paper pulp, even lobster shells.
This is the advantage of the company's product, EcoCradle: it does not require fossil fuels to manufacture and it's fully compostable. When it arrives on your doorstep, you simply throw it on the garden. Within 90 days, it's biodegraded. "If you look at a piece of Styrofoam [polystyrene]," says McIntyre, "it's derived from a resource that's been in the earth for 65 million years. If you look at a piece of cardboard, it comes from a tree that grew for seven or eight years before it could be sustainably harvested.
We're taking waste and growing a fungus around it in five to seven days. From raw material to finished product," Bayer adds, "we're faster than anyone else in the world."
Like many a Vermont boy, Bayer spent his childhood winters drilling holes in the trees near his family's maple-syrup farm. "Thousands and thousands of holes," he says. It was there in the forest that he first encountered the fungus called mycelium. "You kick over a log and there's this white stretchy stuff holding the leaves together," he explains. "I didn't think anything of it at the time, but later in college I was thinking of ways to make adhesives and it came back to me."
Bayer was slogging his way through a senior-level engineering course. His instructor was emphatically unimpressed with his class project -- a wind turbine with no movable parts. In a fit of pique, Bayer tossed out another option. What if you could coax tiny filaments of mycelium into knitting a panel of foam insulation, the kind you tuck into the walls of your home? The professor paused to consider the possibilities. He was intrigued -- so much so that Bayer re-enrolled in his course the following term.
Bayer enlisted the help of McIntyre, a fellow student who consumed biology books with the same zeal with which he devoured science fiction. The two had studied together for four years. They shared similar backgrounds. McIntyre grew up on Long Island, in the tiny town of Yaphank. His mother was a biologist and his father a mechanical engineer. Both men loved to hike.
McIntyre offered to grow the first foam samples in his university accommodation using psilocybin spores bought online. "We'd take perlite and mineral oil and wheat bran and mix them up on the stove," Bayer says. "We'd put them into moulds and impregnate them with fungus we bought off the internet. We'd put them under Gavin's bed and they'd grow -- usually things we didn't want, but occasionally we'd get something interesting."
The two worked away on the project for months. When they graduated in May 2007 with dual degrees in mechanical engineering and product design, their professor pushed them to keep on working. "He was the one who got Gavin and me to take the next step with it," Bayer says. "Otherwise I probably never would have moved forward." Saddled with student loans and no income, the graduates moved the operation into a business incubator on the RPI campus.
For $500 (£325) a month, they were given a workspace in an old classroom building. At night, they'd roam the halls exploring. They discovered a photographic space in the basement and annexed the darkroom. It had a sink and a ventilator hood. This became their first R&D lab.
After taking a five-day course on how to start a company, the nascent entrepreneurs drew up a business plan that won a green challenge competition at Oxford University. They used the £10,000 prize to start testing their foam panels. The results were encouraging: the material was waterproof, fire-retardant and had an R2 thermal rating (comparable to fibreglass insulation). It was also 100 per cent biodegradable.
This last part wasn't a big plus for building materials, but Bayer and McIntyre saw an opportunity to change direction. It was a huge selling point for packaging.
Foam polystyrene was first produced commercially by chemist Ray McIntire in 1937, when household goods arrived on doorsteps packed in straw or sawdust. Because of its buoyancy, the new plastic was originally adopted by the US Coast Guard for use in the construction of rafts.
But little by little, McIntire's employer, the Dow Chemical Company, found a whole range of applications for it. In 1954, polystyrene began to be used for insulating homes and packaging goods.
In 1950, companies worldwide produced 1.7 million tons of plastics. By 2010, that had climbed to 260 million. But with it came vast waste. After exposure to the elements and transport, that plastic -- polystyrene included -- breaks down into little pellets that make their way into the water system, and are transported to the sea. Traces of the material have been found inside zooplankton, mussels, barnacles, fish, seabirds and whales in every ocean in the world. Filmmaker Rebecca Hosking uncovered them in albatross chicks on Midway Island -- 4,500km west of California and 3,540km east of Japan. The polystyrene that enters homes in meat trays, takeaway containers, coffee cups and egg cartons breaks down, but it never goes away. Every particle ever created exists somewhere on the planet.
When Belgian chemist Leo Baekeland invented Bakelite plastic in 1909, he was looking to create a synthetic polymer that resembled the shellac secreted by the Asian beetle. Bayer and McIntyre could not be more disdainful of that approach. The two have spent a lifetime admiring nature and wondering how its methods might be applied to improve technology. On the way to lunch in McIntyre's blue Subaru, Bayer launches into a discussion on the globe's limited water resources. He begins by praising the ingenuity of trees in Africa with root structures that bore 122 metres into the continent's parched soil. Their leaves release water, he explains.
If you could find a way to harvest the dew, you could transform the lives of millions of poor people.
This prompts McIntyre into a glowing account of the water-filtration system developed by the sand dollar, a
burrowing echinoid related to the sea urchin. In a cubby beneath his dashboard sits a handful of seashells. When asked if they are keepsakes or research materials, McIntyre nods towards one encrusted with barnacles. "That's a very strong bond they've created," he says.
In essence, the duo's philosophy can be summed up as follows: why create synthetic substitutes when, over billions of years, nature has evolved viable iterations? This worldview was shaped by their years at RPI, where the engineering class has a rigorous philanthropic component. "The whole point was to develop a patentable technology that will have a significant positive impact on the world -- it could be social, it could be environmental,"
Bayer says. Called "Inventor's Studio", the course is still taught by inventor and entrepreneur Burt Swersey.
Before joining the RPI, Swersey, a Cornell graduate, worked for 26 years inventing and refining metabolic scales for the medical industry. Along the way, he founded four companies. When he retired in 1988 at 52, he had more than 15 patents to his name. He devoted the next two decades to instructing college students on the principles of entrepreneurship and creativity. Inventor's Studio challenged students to find overlooked problems to solve. "People weren't designing new cell-phone covers," says McIntyre. "We were designing products that had applications in the Third World. Quite a few companies that came out of that programme are non-profit. They're not working on the next-generation flat-screen TV. They're working on an inexpensive wind turbine that can be constructed from garbage."
Ecovative's founders want to create a high-growth business that's profitable -- but on an industrial scale. "We want to be the world leader in sustainable materials -- just like Dow or DuPont were last century's leader in environmentally damaging synthetic
materials," Bayer says. "We want to get rid of plastics in disposable applications."
Displayed in the steel warehouse that is Ecovative's headquarters is a horseshoe crab shell on a shelf and a surfboard made from EcoCradle foam. McIntyre's pet chinchilla, Audrey, scoots around the reception area tucked inside a clear plastic ball.
Bayer and McIntyre's team includes a beekeeper, an architect and a winemaker. Mycologist Sue Van Hook came from California to join their efforts, and experts at have been generous with advice. "We've been pretty lucky at cold-calling some high-level people," says McIntyre. When he and Bayer needed hard data to verify their claims, for example, the director of the fire research laboratory at the National Institute for Science and Technology in Gaithersburg, Maryland, made them an offer, as a startup, they couldn't refuse. "If you come down here," he said, "we'll show you how to use the equipment and you can test it yourselves."
Ecovative now produces roughly 10,000 units of EcoCradle foam per week, nearly all for Dell and office-furniture manufacturer Steelcase.
Unlike a Silicon Valley software business, the company can't extend its reach simply by doubling its server capacity. To open new markets, Ecovative must have facilities throughout the US. To expand overseas, it needs people in China, where most of the products that require packaging are made. The promise of manufacturing jobs has an irresistible appeal to politicians, and Ecovative's R&D lab has received more than $4 million (£2.6 million) in grant money from US state and federal sources. Bayer has also been hailed for his message: he was invited to speak at TEDGlobal in Oxford in July 2010. It's not enough, though, to impress scientists, politicians and thought leaders. To succeed, Ecovative will have to convert industry sceptics -- the people charged with getting goods to the public in perfect condition. "The material they're producing can't be sold as just a sustainable substitute," Swersey says. "It has to be even better than Styrofoam."
Multinationals are buzzing with sustainability initiatives.
U-Haul claims to have diverted more than 170,000 cubic metres of polystyrene from landfills by switching to peanut packaging made from corn and potato starch. Walmart encourages suppliers to create greener packaging by employing an online scorecard that evaluates some 627,000 items sold in its stores. Pepsi plans to unveil a new bottle in 2012 whose manufacture requires no petroleum: instead, the plastic is fashioned from sugars stored in switch grass, pine bark and corn husks. Ford is hoping to replace 14kg of petrol-based material in each car. It has already adopted soy-based seat cushions, and is now experimenting with resins produced from algae, wheat straw and chicken feathers. The company's plastics research team is also considering Ecovative's mushroom foam for use in bumpers, dashboards and side doors. "Industry has thought of Styrofoam as one of those workhorses you couldn't replace, much as they once thought of chlorofluorocarbons," says Joel Makower of the GreenBiz Group consultancy. "Nobody likes Styrofoam. You can't do anything with it at the back end, except maybe break it down into something that can be remoulded, but the options aren't attractive. Now you have something that goes into the soil and becomes a nutrient. That's the cradle-to-cradle dream."
Steelcase's logistics manager Dennis Carlson approached Ecovative in summer 2009. He'd searched for alternatives to polystyrene, but had found little on the market that was cost-effective, and was concerned that most products' green credentials were questionable: if the petroleum wasn't in the packaging, it was used to collect the materials from faraway lands.
After months of testing and refining, Steelcase started using Ecovative's EcoCradle packaging in June 2010. Many of the company's products now arrive in Europe, Canada, Mexico, China, Japan, Malaysia and Saudi Arabia packed in mycelium fibre. It takes a little extra paperwork to convince each new market that the material is parasite-free, says Carlson; but Bayer has been able to convince potential new partners of Ecovative's production process right down to the industrial ovens that halt the mycelium's growth. EcoCradle costs no more than Styrofoam. And with increased automation, more volume and additional efficiencies in shipping, it is likely to grow less expensive.
Ecovative achieved a modest $500,000 in sales in 2010, but the company recently received Series B financing from 3M, RPI and the Dutch Doen Foundation. This year, it will expand into a 929-square-metre space in the Albany area, where Bayer plans to build a model facility almost entirely out of off-the-shelf equipment. The production line will be able to produce 120,000 parts per week. The goal is to show that the technology is easily transferable anywhere in the world.
For Bayer, the $20 billion polystyrene business is just the start. "There's hundreds of billions of dollars in expanded foams," he says. "Even more if you start to look at plastic films. Plastic is all around us."
Chris Raymond is a freelance writer and editor.
This article was originally published by WIRED UK
