My sister worked as an intern on mycelium as fertilizer. Basically, using cover crops create a small mycelium layer that helps plant grow and reduce fertilizer use (by fixing nitrogen probably). Her job was to find molecules that would make the mycelium, and only the mycelium, grow quicker.
That's a very interesting field to study, and it seems promising.
Looks really cool, though I don't know if the name is conducive to business. With just the URL I would not have clicked to see that the business is about.
Ironically I only came to this HN post and clicked on the URL because of the name. At first I misunderstood the description and thought they were doing industrial-scale packaging of magical mushroom mycelium.
Years ago I ran an ecommerce site for gourmet and medicinal mushrooms. We certainly had nothing to do with illegal mushrooms, but I liberally sprinkled the word 'magic' where ever possible. Also the words 'Ann+Arbor'... It seemed to drive some traffic.
There are already companies that use packaging made from formed paper and sugarcane. I would be interested to see what mycelium packaging offers over this.
I believe the mushroom packaging is more like a foam, so it may be able to better protect products. Additionally, it may have a more "premium" feeling/appearance vs. pulp packaging.
Looking at the images, it looks less premium to me than the smoother mouled paper inserts I've seen on electronic products. You could be right on with the foam aspect though.
Not sure if they were the first, or whatever, but this really seems like a breakthrough technology / methodology. How many cardboard boxes do we use a day? The mind boggles.
This seems more like a replacement for Styrofoam rather than cardboard boxes, though it could certainly be used in places we already use cardboard inserts. But probably still need a cardboard box on the outside. Thankfully we can grow those too!!
> This seems more like a replacement for Styrofoam rather than cardboard boxes
It seems rigid though, more akin to cardboard than soft styrofoam. I don't see anything about how dampening it is, but from the pictures I also assumed it was more like cardboard than styrofoam. Maybe the color is deceiving me though.
Under "Features" it explicitly calls out polystyrene as what it is meant to replace, and under "Performance" they claim to provide for clients "that demand the same technical performance as the polystyrene we replace"
I don't think this is better for the environment than cardboard (if anything it is probably worse as a direct replacement for cardboard because cardboard already has a robust recycling supplychain). Rather, it is a replacement for plastic foam.
That's a very interesting field to study, and it seems promising.
E.g. https://www.jishan-group.com/pulp-products.
Totally cool stuff.
Under Features, it lists polystyrene products as what it replaces, not cardboard.
It seems rigid though, more akin to cardboard than soft styrofoam. I don't see anything about how dampening it is, but from the pictures I also assumed it was more like cardboard than styrofoam. Maybe the color is deceiving me though.
Under "Features" it explicitly calls out polystyrene as what it is meant to replace, and under "Performance" they claim to provide for clients "that demand the same technical performance as the polystyrene we replace"
https://magicalmushroom.com/manufacturing/the-factories
geographically, perhaps, not EU though. and not relevant to EU where there are at least several similar companies such as
Grown.bio - Netherlands PermaFungi - Brussels (New 1,400 m² factory) RongoDesign - Romania Biomyc - Bulgaria
perhaps more. So this title is super misleading - not first, not Europe's, but perhaps UK's
I figure that's why they said Europe's first industrial scale; not the EU's first industrial scale...
You know that a company can own factories in other countries, yes?
“Europe's first industrial-scale mycelium packaging producer”.