Often, when one thing begins to rot, it will get pitched within the trash. However Joanne Rodriguez desires to show the idea of rot on its head by rising fungus on trash to show it into one thing higher.
“We practice mushrooms to eat trash and create renewable, bio-based uncooked supplies,” she instructed Prime Time News24.
Rodriguez is the founder and CEO of Mycocycle, one in every of a contemporary crop of startups utilizing fungi, nature’s recyclers, to create plastic-like polymers for a post-fossil gasoline economic system. Immediately, practically all plastics are produced from oil and fuel, and they’re liable for about 3.4% of all greenhouse fuel emissions, in accordance with the OECD.
“We wish to have the ability to compete with the 3Ms and BASFs and Dows of the world,” Rodriguez stated.
That’s no small purpose. Plastics are seemingly in every single place, from meals packaging to constructing supplies. Because of that ubiquity, the worldwide plastics trade is price $624 billion, in accordance with Grand View Analysis.
Mycocycle hopes not solely to seize a portion of that market, but additionally inject its imaginative and prescient of circularity through the use of its fungi to actually devour the plastics its competitors produces.
The corporate has turned to a gaggle of fungi often called white-rot mushrooms. In nature, fungi are inclined to thrive on issues like lifeless leaves and wooden, however Mycocycle’s mushrooms have been chosen for his or her means to interrupt down supplies produced utilizing oil and fuel. The startup makes use of pure choice to search out these greatest match for the job, selecting to not genetically modify the strains. “I drew that line fairly early on,” Rodriguez stated.
Handled gypsum waste sits prepared to be used in industrial fillers and foams. Picture Credit: Mycoworks
When the fungi get to work, they decompose the waste natural matter by suffusing it with their root-like hyphae. Although the hyphae seem much like the roots of vegetation, they aren’t fabricated from cellulose like a plant’s fibers. As an alternative, they’re fabricated from chitin, the identical stuff that bugs use to construct their exoskeletons. As these hyphae come into contact with carbon-based molecules, they break them down, utilizing the meals supply to develop and prolong their attain.
Rodriguez stated that Mycocycle’s fungi can work on a variety of waste, together with paper, rubber and nylon. In a latest industrial demonstration, the startup grew its fungi on scrap drywall leftover from the development of a Meta information middle. The startup delivered one in every of its bio-processors to a close-by dumpster firm, which crushed the drywall and dumped it into the processor together with the fungi from Mycocycle. The bio-processor then maintained the fungi’s optimum temperature, between 60 and 80 levels F, for about two weeks.
As soon as a cycle is full, Mycocycle kills the fungi to make sure they don’t continue to grow. “We don’t need to put mildew again into our constructing,” Rodriguez stated. The top result’s a product that may be bought, somewhat than waste that prices cash to eliminate.
The ensuing materials can be utilized in a spread of merchandise, together with insulation, acoustic panels for sound management, and filler to bulk up issues like concrete. (The recycled materials from the Meta challenge will probably change into filler since fungi solely devour the paper that covers the drywall, not the gypsum it encases.) The fungi don’t devour all of the rubber, however somewhat encases it in an online of mycelia, all of which Rodriguez stated Mycocycle can course of as soon as extra when it reaches the tip of its life.
Two Mycocycle staff put together the corporate’s mycelium-based therapy. Picture Credit: Mycoworks
Mycoycle, which Rodriguez based in 2018, is at the moment working to refine its course of for recycling crumb rubber, the waste produced from previous tires. It’s a large potential market, with the U.S. producing about 280 million yearly.
To proceed its R&D and commercialization efforts, the corporate raised a $3.6 million seed extension, the corporate instructed Prime Time News24 completely. The spherical was led by Closed Loop Companions and included investments from the Illinois Invent Fund, the Telus Pollinator Fund for Good and U.S. Enterprise.
Mycocycle will usher in over $1 million in income this yr, Rodriguez stated. “We’ll be margin constructive.” The crumb rubber processing a part of the enterprise is maybe probably the most promising, she added.
“One of many strategic buyers on this spherical is trying particularly at this rubber market at scale for the precise purpose that we’ve recycled tires the identical method for 40 years,” she stated. “They see the danger, they usually see the chance.”
