Thalia Assuras:When you get a new high-tech gadget, maybe a new TV or a computer, how much thought do you give to what it arrives in? Probably none. Well, one U.S. company is picking up the slack for all of us. Ecovative Designs has developed a new natural way to protect your booty by turning to mother nature. energyNOW’s Josh Zepps explains in this energyNEXT.

Josh Zepps:Mushrooms! I love them, stuffed mushrooms, sautéed mushrooms, baked mushrooms, mushroom pot pie, mushroom soup, mushroom stew, mushroom Styrofoam packing material. I don’t really understand that last one, which is why I’m here in Green Island, New York to find out.

At first glance, you could be in a restaurant kitchen, storage containers full of rice and grains, cereal by the mounds. But, if you look a little closer, that pile of succulent cereals starts to look more like honeybunches of buckwheat hulls and cotton gin trash. If this is a kitchen, I’m eating in tonight.

Luckily, it’s not, it’s a lab. And what you see here ends up here. Nope! This is not a delicious rice crispy treat, it’s the next generation of packaging, lightweight, sturdy and you don’t even manufacture it, you grow it. It’s called “EcoCradle” developed by Ecovative Designs as a green energy efficient alternative to Styrofoam. But the way the two materials are created and the way they are destroyed could not be more different.

That white stuff there is mushroom roots or mycelium. Those natural, sprawling, sticky, veiny threads of fungus.

Eben Bayer:I used to see this mycelium in the woods growing up as a kid and thought it was a cool glue. We essentially use mycelium as a glue on our process to bind particles together just like you’d use a plastic as a resin to hold foams together.

Josh Zepps:That’s Eben Bayer who invented the mushroom packaging and founded the company with his college buddy, Gavin McIntyre.

And so, what do you got against Styrofoam?

Eben Bayer:Well, there’s a couple of big issues with expanded polystyrene in a Styrofoam. The first being the energy content in this material. It’s made from a precious resource fossil fuels.

Josh Zepps:Styrofoam is a brand name for expanded polystyrene and Eben says that making an EcoCradle takes just one-tenth the energy of making the same amount of Styrofoam.

Eben Bayer:The other big problem with this material is its got all this energy it, but it doesn’t breakdown at all in the natural environment.

Josh Zepps:Think about it, the moment the Styrofoam has ripped off your son’s new Xbox or your uncle’s new wall mountable singing bass, it goes straight to the trash to clog up a landfill, hardly any recycling programs will take it.

But EcoCradle disintegrates harmlessly. To understand how and why, I’ve got to see it being made with Ecovative Environmental Director and Design Engineer Sam Harrington.

Sam Harrington:This is the raw material for EcoCradle. So this is cotton gin by-products. This has all the burrs and the sticks and twigs, everything except for the fiber that makes your shirt.

This bin agitates it and sucks it up into our production system, and from there, it’s pasteurized that kills any molds, spores, or bacteria, or bugs that might come out the farm.

Josh Zepps:Right. So there could be bugs and dangerous spores in this that I’m holding here.

Sam Harrington:Yeah. Who knows what comes off the farms.

Josh Zepps:Sure, it’s dirty. But that’s kind of part of the beauty. This process can use all kinds of agricultural wastes depending on what’s native to the region. One place might use sawdust, another rice husks.

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Keeping the energy output to a minimum is the goal, so Ecovative make sure they get the waste material from local farms. And unlike fossil fuels, this garbage will always be cheap. Peak oil perhaps, but you don’t hear about peak seed husk.

Sam Harrington:This is EcoCradle after it’s grown for about a week. So we take that plant matter that we showed you before and add mycelium.

Josh Zepps:Yeah, you can even actually see the husks that I was just holding in my hand that are still in there. This is only after one week.

Sam Harrington:Yup. So all those little fibers are reaching out towards the husks because they see it as food and at the same time they’re bonding in altogether in this network of fibers.

Josh Zepps:This is where the fungus performs its magic. It’s a process that takes place everyday, everywhere from the rainforest floor to that old Chinese takeout in the back of my fridge. Mycologist Sue Van Hook takes me into the woods to explain it.

Sue Van Hook:So the fungi are this entire kingdom of organisms that are underneath our feet. The fungi are debris chasers. They are nature’s recyclers. If we didn’t have the fungi, this woods would be up to the sky and leaves, and twigs and carcasses.

Josh Zepps:So that job of a fungi in the woods to be the demolisher of debris, is that essentially what you’re trying to harness at Ecovative?

Sue Van Hook:It’s exactly what we’re doing. When we go out to the woods, we find a mushroom or a fruiting body and take a little piece of tissue.

Josh Zepps:That little bit of tissue is taken to a lab where technicians clone it repeatedly. It’s an impressive example of sustainable production. There’s no strain on the fungi and Ecovative has an endless supply of an already renewable resource. A few cells from this tiny little specimen are all that’s needed to make thousands of EcoCradle parts.

Male:Can you see all the little microscopic fibers?

Josh Zepps:Yeah. Like little hairs, it’s the little fibers.

On a microscopic level, it’s a busy scene. The interconnecting branches of mycelia are so numerous and so haphazardly sprawling, they could have been designed by the Los Angeles Department of Freeways.

Looks like mold to me.

Male:Yup. It is.

[Laughter]

Josh Zepps:Eventually, the block of mycelium is baked in a low temperature to dry it out, locking its shape and kill the shroom. This is the most energy intensive part of the process, but it’s still a whole lot better than Styrofoam’s superheated steam.

As I guess, this is the final products, right?

Sam Harrington:Yup.

Josh Zepps:And I know you guys are working on applications to do with home insulation. You can definitely see that here.

Sam Harrington:Right. It’s great insulation and it’s fireproof.

Josh Zepps:It’s fireproof.

Sam Harrington:Yup.

Josh Zepps:Can you prove that?

Sam Harrington:I sure can.

Josh Zepps:You might think something made entirely of organic material would burn like -- well, like organic material. But no, although please, don’t try this at home. I’m a professional reporter. So I may not know what I’m doing but I’m insured.

And now, regular Styrofoam.

Ditching artificial packaging for all natural packaging could reduce our fossil fuel consumption, our trash, energy costs and carbon emissions. Ecovative has big plans.

Eben Bayer:This technology is in its infancy, so it sort of like where plastics was in the ’50s. We expect to continue to extend the technology, eventually even making things like thin films like a cellophane.

Josh Zepps:If these guys have their way in the future, all packaging will be energy efficient, biodegradable and edible.

Though it could probably use a little salt. In Green Island, New York, Josh Zepps, energyNOW.

Thalia Assuras:One new place you may see Ecovative packing materials is if you buy a Dell computer. Look for the mushrooms when Dell starts pilot shipment soon for its PowerEdge R710 server. Dell wants to cut 20 million pounds of current packaging material by 2012 by using Earth-friendly material instead.

Ecovative is also teaming up with Ford to develop a biodegradable mushroom foam for bumper, side doors and dashboards.