A photo from open sources PHOTO: Youtube / Ecovative Mushroom can be a worthy replacement for conventional building materials, sure American inventors. American inventors believe that mushrooms can be a worthy alternative to habitual building materials. To prove this, they built the first in world house, the basis of which is mycelium. Authors of the project – Ecovative founders Iben Bayer and Gavin McIntyre. TO the conclusion that mushrooms can be used in construction, they came by chance. Once, when Bayer was walking through the forest, he noticed that mushrooms growing on wood chips fasten them tightly, writes Daily Mail. The technology is based on the mycelium, which consists of lots of tiny fibers. Mushroom bricks do this: in mushrooms in a container are grown on a mixture of crushed corn fibers, rice husks and other agricultural wastes. Through for several days the mycelium grows, a dense network forms fungal filaments, while secreting substances that stick together the substrate, on which it grows. The resulting brick is removed from the mold and heated in the oven. Drying and heat treatment are necessary to kill mycelium and stop its growth. After that mushroom brick becomes like clay concrete (building material from clay soil, dried outdoors): it is light and it’s hard to destroy.
Such material can also be used to join wooden elements. The American-built house clearly demonstrates this. The frame of the house is made of pine boards, there are cavities inside the walls, which are filled with a mixture of mycelium and substrate. She serves in this case insulator and replaces the mounting foam. Such houses can self-healing and self-disinfecting. Mushroom picker fits for the production of a wide variety of items, including furniture. we we can get very flexible materials or, on the contrary, hard ones, like tree, “McIntyre quotes FoxNews. MacIntyre and Bayer suggest that the material they invented can in many cases replace plastic. For example, from it you can make sea buoys, soles for shoes, bumpers for cars that, unlike plastic, will completely biodegradable.
Sergey SEMAKOV
Mushrooms Plastic
