Researchers have a particularly impressive engineering of fungus evaluated the possibilities and found that it could replace plastic in many different use cases.
instead of plastic using mushrooms can reduce the mountains of waste created by humans. Plastics made from fossil fuels are actually really difficult to recycle and often result in messy landfills, landscapes and waterways. On the other hand, materials made from mushrooms are biodegradable and can be reused to make more of the same material at the end of a product’s life.
Fomes fomentarius mushroom, Science Advances That’s the focus of new research published today in the journal Cell. He has an extraordinary ability to produce a wide variety of materials with properties ranging from soft and spongy to hard and woody. By studying the architecture of the fungus, researchers hope to pave the way for it to become a more sustainable building block of our lives.
Co-author of the new paper and a senior scientist at the VTT Technical Research Center in Finland. Pezhman Mohammadi “We really admired the structure, because if you’re a biologist, one thing you’ll quickly realize is that when something this beautiful begins to form, nature didn’t do it because of how beautiful it is: it must have a function.” says.
in the wild, F. fomentarius, it may look like a horse’s hoof sticking out from a tree trunk. People have used it as kindling to start fires for thousands of years. This is how it earned the nicknames hoof fungus and tinder mushroom. New research indicates that it could also be used in the future to create a new class of ultralight high-performance materials.
Meet the fungus that could one day replace plastic
The unique thing about this mushroom is that it has three layers, each with different properties that can be useful in different ways. There is a very hard outer shell that can be used to make impact resistant coatings for windshields, for example. Next, to Mohammadi There is a soft middle layer that can mimic leather. The third inner layer looks like wood. The research team used advanced imaging techniques and mechanical durability tests to examine each layer and evaluate its potential uses.
Interest in mushroom-based building materials, packaging and textile products is already increasing. And Mohammadi and his team, forming a mushroom mycelium has already created a headset prototype kit using the thread-like structure called
Of course, there is still a long way to go before fungi can replace plastic. You cannot harvest them from forests as they will cause too much damage to the ecosystem. of mycelium will have to be mass produced for the market. Also, to highlight certain features, change your genome may be needed. And there’s more research and testing that needs to be done to make sure the resulting materials strike the balance of being both biodegradable and durable enough for consumers.