In middle school when I had the good fortune to take “Intro
to: Not Being a Butt to Your Environment, Man”, we all learned how awful
polystyrene, what Styrofoam is made of, is. The
environment’s boogeyman manifest, this stuff takes hundreds of years to degrade
if chucked out the window, and far, faaar longer when put in a landfill.
SCIENCE TIME. The reason we don’t see polystyrene degrade
quickly is because it is immune to photolysis. In my terms this means
light/radiation balls do not naturally bump polystyrene matter balls into
simpler stuff, and thus biological things have to go to town for polystyrene to
degrade (academia, you need me).
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| I AM STYRON MAN |
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| The Mid Atlantic garbage past is a 10/10 on the nasty meter. Then again, SPACE ART! |
Polystyrene also floats in water, and is toxic when marine
life chooses to eat the stuff. When you burn extruded polystyrene (think foam
boards and similar materials), you give off some gases that are over 1000 times
worse than carbon monoxide for our atmosphere. Fact: the atmosphere ranks in
the top 5 things making us not dead.
So how do we move away from polystyrene? Save the world? I
came here for food pics, give me now? That’s right, MUSHROOMS!
Ecovative design, a sustainable materials company, figured
out a way to use mycelium to grow packaging materials. Mycelium is the eaty
part of the mushroom and is made up of hyphae, little threads, that grow
throughout a substrate and secrete chemicals to break down and consume what’s in
the substrate. Ecovative Designs makes molds, fills it with grain husk waste,
let’s the mycelium run rampant, and then bakes it. BOOM packaging.
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| Ecovative Design wine cases are cool... But mushroom wine bags would be classier |
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| Tastriations |
I decided not to go the hyphae route since making little
threads wouldn’t have been terribly interesting. These Meringue based mushrooms
have a cocoa profile, and the heads are filled with chocolate. It’s as simply delicious as that.
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| YOU'RE NEXT |
