Ep. 89: Turning mushrooms into leather and foam

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Ep. 89: Turning mushrooms into leather and foam

This month, WTiN talks to Gavin McIntyre, co-founder at New York-based company Ecovative about its innovation – Mycelium.

WTiN
Hello and welcome to textile innovation hosted by WTiN. My name is Ruby and I'm the news editor and your podcast host. Each month we're going to be joined by a brand new special guest. So join me and my colleagues as we deep dive into what's new, what's interesting and what unmissable innovations have hit the market recently, we cover everything on the podcast from sustainability to startups and the latest research developments. And we also quiz the experts in the fields about their new products and ideas across a huge spectrum that is the textiles industry. So no matter what your interest is WTiN have you covered and we can connect you to everything you need to know right here from our central hub in the UK. In this episode, I talk to Gavin McIntyre of Ecovative based out of New York in the US the company grows and designs sustainable materials straight from nature. Its innovation called mycelium can be turned into plastic, leather and packaging alternatives. Among other things. Together, we talk about why Ecovative uses mushrooms scalability, and why the company thinks it's so important to have alternative materials. Firstly, I want to say thank you so much for joining me, I have covered a few articles about you already. And I'm very excited to delve more into this. Let's start with some background information. Do you want to share a bit about your history in textiles? And have you always worked in the sustainability sector?

Gavin McIntyre
Well, in terms of personal history, I've always been passionate about sustainability and sustainable design, both as it relates to new constructs for economies to product development and new material science as it relates to the field of textiles. This is a relatively new field for Ecovative. And for myself, one of the areas that we're focusing on, of course, is some of the world's most pressing problems as it relates to both plastic pollution and animal agriculture. And when we look into the fashion and apparel category, there's just a tremendous amount of waste both of those principal industries that we believe we can solve using our mycelium based technology. And so that's really what drove us to focus it on this particular sector. And we believe we can provide a lot of value through the structure of mycelium.

WTiN
You guys are based in the US. But as I said, I've been covering some news on you recently, and you make some pretty big waves all over really. Do you want to start by telling us what Ecovative does, and more importantly, why you do what you do?

Gavin McIntyre
So Ecovative is a 15 year old materials technology company that focuses on leveraging mycelium the vegetative or root like structure of mushroom to transform agricultural residue into next generation materials were able to leverage vertical farms in order to grow unique and bespoke mycelium based products that can provide material attributes that are competitive with conventional plastics and animal based products. We do this namely, because we see the devastating consequences over the last century and beyond that these incumbent industries be at plastics or animal agriculture have on our planet as it relates to waste that's been generated and then trickles into our food supply chain such as microplastic, all the way through to the tremendous amount of water energy and land use that goes into conventional animal agriculture. And we believe we can do better by simply looking to nature to solve some of these global challenges.

WTiN
You have an obvious one here, but why mushrooms?

Gavin McIntyre
So when Evan and I first started Ecovative, we focused on mushroom because in nature, there are in essence, nature's recycling system. They're very adept at taking leaf litter and coarse woody debris and transforming that into the mushrooms that you see growing on the side of a tree. And just like the mushrooms that grow along the forest floor on the side of a tree, they all have very unique and distinct material properties. So as to mechanical engineers, we look to truly understand these unique material properties and how they can be applied to industry through industrial scale, one being able to transform this vast quantity of agricultural and forestry debris that's produced annually and valorize it or upcycle it into higher value material is something that fungi are naturally well tuned to do and that we're applying their great capabilities at an industrial scale.

WTiN
So in the time that the company has been around, you've taken part in some pretty amazing things I read the company was the winner of the postcode lottery green challenge and the other co founder Eben Bayer, who mentioned just a moment ago, when the Lemelson MIT prize and did a TED talk, and these are some fantastic feats but as the company faced any challenges in its time of supply chain issues more recently or struggling to find scientists, or has the pandemic brought on any problems, for example?

Gavin McIntyre
Of course, we experienced challenges over our 15 year. Here's one as you mentioned, in terms of the postcode lottery award, when we first got started growing mycelium based materials and our first product is in the field of packaging. Mushroom packaging is still our most mature business today. What we were doing was really quite bizarre. And so it was challenging for us to attract conventional investment with this new material technology before we've demonstrated its ability to add Enter and serve the market. So one of the challenges was identifying different financing sources and allows us to grow and scale. And so we were successful in winning a number of business plan competition, as well as research grants from organisations like the Environmental Protection Agency and the National Science Foundation here in the states to both spur our research as well as to initiate the scale back in 2009. To introduce our first products, once we were at that initial scale, we ran into a number of challenges, and some of the lessons learned that I would share is one, as a team of engineers and innovators, we were really focused on developing our own process equipment as what we were doing was unique to the world, we thought that we needed to develop unique process equipment in order to bring it to scale, rather than looking to analogous industries to adapt existing infrastructure to meet our needs. That required a tremendous amount of time and capital investment. And candidly, that equipment didn't always work exceedingly well. And so as a lesson learned, we've really looked to other industries, like the mushroom cultivation industry, which has a lot of experience in vertical farming, and cultivating not by psyllium. But mushrooms, something relatively analogous to assist in our next generation of scale. One of the other lessons that we've certainly learned was really around how you scale over time. So we really focus on individual magnet of scale. So you can think of that as going from 10 pounds to 100 pounds to 1000 pounds. The reason being is that thermodynamics works at different scales in different ways. And if you attempt to just scale something from a benchtop, to a massive commercial scale, there's a number of hurdles and risks that are unperceived at that time, that you're going to run into, and then end up taking more time costing more and become more of a meaningful challenge. So we've really learned to take more of an incremental approach to scale to mitigate risk, which has led us to be far more successful as we bring new technologies to market.

WTiN
I just want to circle back to something you've mentioned a couple times. Now, just for those who might not know what it is. You've mentioned vertical farming a couple of times, what exactly is that?

Gavin McIntyre
So if you were to come into one of our farms, which we operate a number of them here, and in upstate New York, what you'll see these large white boxes in those boxes, we control the surrounding environment very similar to plants, fungi respond and grow in accordance with their environment. So we can change different temperature conditions and things of that nature in order to get the mycelium to grow into different structures. And so we have these large, environmentally controlled chamber and we really maximise the entire volume. So we stack these growth beds, or materials that are being grown on top of one another so that we can really optimise the total volume of product that can grow within a given cycle. And so this is very analogous to the vertical farming paradigm you might see and cultivating things like leafy greens or strawberries, but rather than being intensive for energy and requiring a lot of light. Since mycelium do not grow in accordance with light, we regulate different environmental factors. And we farm materials opposed to conventional food products.

WTiN
Amazing. Thank you so much for explaining that. So let's move on to talk about what we're all here for the first place and this fantastic technology that you've developed starting with mycelium and where it can be used in terms of consumer goods, but more specifically with textiles. Do you want to explain a little bit about that?

Gavin McIntyre
Oh, certainly. So at Ecovative we've employed mycelium in a wide range of individual markets and we have two platform technologies one that we call Miko composite in which we use mycelium in essence as a natural glue to bind particles together into custom moulded shapes and product applications here range from protective packaging material to we have partners that grow furniture, building construction materials, and even surfboard cores. So there's a real wide range of product applications there. But the value of mycelium was really constrained in the micro composite platform and we saw more value in just mycelium only materials and that led us to what we call our air mycelium platform where we're able to cultivate pure mycelium slabs in essence that can then be transformed into other materials depending on the mushroom species that we're using. And in this instance, we've been able to cultivate everything from delicious and nutritious meat alternatives such as our Matt my bacon product, which uses a gourmet mushroom species to very tough and tenacious Alas, turmeric foams and leather like textiles using very robust fungal species that are native throughout both Europe as well as North America. And so we really see the unique ability of fungi to be able to isolate individual material properties from a mushroom that could be interesting for fields, be it from wind turbine blades to automotive composites, and then cultivate those at scale. So we really see these early product applications, such as ones in textiles, it's really just the tip of the spear for where mycelium can really serve.

WTiN
So where do you source all these mushrooms from? Is it grown in house or was it shipped over from somewhere or?

Gavin McIntyre
We tap into what we call the foragers secret and if you know anyone who likes to go out and forage for mushrooms at typically this time of year, you'll know that they are really looking for mushrooms that have really great either taste and texture that they can find out in the wilderness for us, we tap into mushrooms for their material properties. And so similarly, we look for mushrooms that have either tough and tenacious material properties or really good resilience. If we're looking for an elastomeric foam. It's an example because the mushrooms properties really are indicative of the properties we might find in the mycelium. So today, our scientists get to go out into the woods, identify and isolate new mushroom species that they can bring back to our lab. Once that mushroom is back in our laboratory, we can isolate it on a petri dish, and from there, we can grow it out in perpetuity. So we don't have to go back into the woods or source it from different areas. After that point, we can just continue to grow that individual cell line into a wide range of products without losing product quality or having any deviation from a genetics perspective.

WTiN
Oh wonderful job to have going out and searching for mushrooms.

Gavin McIntyre
It is it is a lot of fun. And this is the time of year where foraging events typically happen within our organisation and our scientists and engineers are encouraged to go out and identify some new mushroom species or strains that we could start to explore the following year.

WTiN
How scalable is this technology? And what is the long term plan for it?

Gavin McIntyre
When we think about scale for our mycelium based materials, it's really based on product category. In the field of protective packaging. We've really focused on being decentralised when we think about our leather like materials such as our forage or hides, and foams that is focused on similar infrastructure that's used in the mushroom cultivation industry. And we know that that industry is infinitely scalable, primarily because it's already used to cultivate over 9 billion pounds of button mushrooms worldwide. And so by tapping into this infrastructure and adapting it for our aerial mycelium processes that then create forage or hides and the light, we know that we can bring these products to ultimate scale where we could serve millions of square metres of product capacity per annum. At this stage, we're at that first bite of being at a what would be the equivalent of about 300,000 square metres per annum. And we're starting to bring additional capacity online through either farms that we construct or by partnering with mushroom farmers around the world.

WTiN
Amazing stuff, one of the many applications that mycelium can be useful as an alternative for leather, as you mentioned, and this topic is something I've been seeing probably a lot recently in the news, we're covering the WTiN Ecovative has a special division for this specifically, can you tell me a bit more about that?

Gavin McIntyre
He could have started the business division that we call for richer a little over a year ago now and foragers specifically focused on the materials that are used both within the fashion and apparel industry. And this ranges from leather like textiles to the elastomeric foams you might find in footwear and handbags, to even the technical installation that might be served today by an animal based product, like goose down as an example are plastic materials like polyester, we see that there is just a huge opportunity within the fashion and apparel industry based on the diversity of the materials that are used. And then oftentimes, garments and articles are composed of multiple different materials which make them hard to reclaim and recycle. And we think that is a great solution space for mycelium.

WTiN
When tested against animal leather and other plastic alternatives. does it perform in the same way? Is it durable? Does it last as long? Are there any notable differences like handfeel, or anything like that?

Gavin McIntyre
When we compare our forage or hides when they're died and finish to conventional animal products or plastic products, they have very comparable performance as it relates to tensile strength, elongation, tear and a number of the other metric that you would consider for conventional leather material as it relates to durability. What's unique about the mycelium based product is it can be designed with the intention to either be as durable as a conventional leather product or to have a short life cycle to fit within the fast fashion sector in which it can passively return to the earth. So our forage or hides are naturally compostable home compostable, that is meaning you can put it in your backyard and they'll degrade in the matter of just weeks. Or you could finish them such that they become far more durable, just like a conventional leather goods that you might pass on for generation. And that really allows us to be flexible to what's really important for us. Through foragers, we're really looking at just providing a substrate or raw material as an alternative to animal hides that the leather tanning industry can take advantage of and transform into a beautiful raw material that can go into articles in a number of different fields. We're think that this is really important because one, the leather tanning industry has literally centuries of artisanal experience and transforming what is a byproduct of the meat industry into beautiful material that is supple and has become loved by many but as we start to see more scrutiny on animal agriculture, you and potentially a decline over time. That's not happening. Right now, in terms of the number of cultivated animals, we want to ensure that this industry has a solution that doesn't direct it towards plastics, because as you're likely aware, oftentimes the conventional leather alternatives are just entirely plastic or predominantly plastic. And we don't believe that that is the right solution for our planet, we really need something that's sufficiently natural, just like animal hides are natural, but doesn't have the same detriment to our planet.

WTiN
With this specifically, what are the plans to expand and scale this on the side of manufacturing?

Gavin McIntyre
We really have a two prong approach. The first is that we invest in our own farming infrastructure. And we've cut the ribbon recently on our first aerial mycelium farm that we call swizzy silos and that's to cultivate an alternative to bacon that we call my bacon. But that same infrastructure is directly applicable to forger both hides and phones and can be applied elsewhere in the world. To do that, we can either construct additional farms like swizzy silo, or we can partner with mushroom farms. And we're doing this concurrently with a farm based in Putnam, Ontario called White crest in which they've adapted one of their conventional button mushroom farm room to grow our aerial mycelium product. And they've been doing that since late last year with a with a good degree of success. And so we really see the opportunity and twofold is we can construct our own farms or we can provide a higher value product to mushroom cultivators around the world by upgrading what was be traditionally mushroom cultivation into aerial mycelium cultivation.

WTiN
On the complete opposite side to this and it's now manufactured, it's a full Garmin is price competitiveness a priority against traditional and fertile and next gen leather.

Gavin McIntyre
When it comes to market adoption, price parity or competitiveness is really important to us as an organisation because we want to ensure that we're democratising technology and that it's accessible by the broader planetary population. If not, we're only serving a really small portion of the total market. And we're not going to have the planetary impact that we're looking for. So today at the scale that we're operating at, which is small and very small in comparison to the conventional leather industry, of course, where you have a higher price point. But through scale and our scale approach, we believe that we'll be able to approach the prices of conventional animal based products over the next couple of years such that we can be a direct substitute for either the plastics or animal based products that you'd find in the market today.

WTiN
Why do you think it is so important to have an alternative to these leathers that you've mentioned, like plastics and traditional animal leather?

Gavin McIntyre
For responding to today is really the voice of the market. And there is increasing scrutiny on animal agriculture. And conventional leather is a byproduct of the animal cultivation industry. I don't think it's the right position. However, to transition to plastics as an alternative to animal products, as has become increasingly apparent over the last decade, the plastics that we've become so dependent on in our everyday lives have started to have a meaningful detrimental impact on our surrounding planet and our own human health. And so finding a nother detrimental technology to potentially solve this animal agriculture is not the right approach or solution. Similarly, we see a lot of value in the leather tanning industry that's developed over centuries. And so we look to provide those artisans and industrialists, a new substrate or raw material to transform into a product that is just as beautiful and high performing as the animal analogues if that's our primary focus, why we believe it's not sufficient just to have a plastic alternative.

WTiN
On the topic of sustainability. I don't know if you've seen or not, but the UN has set the Sustainable Development Goals for 2030. And people are trying to work towards that at the moment. What is your opinion on that? And do you personally think that we'll reach it? And if you don't think we will? What changes do you think need to be made in order to do that?

Gavin McIntyre
Well, first, I think that the Sustainable Development Goals are a great synopsis of what challenges we really face today as humanity. And it's truly is an audacious goal. But unless that goal is clearly stated, and we set a finish line or target for ourselves as a global population, we're not going to make any progress towards those goals. Do I think it's reasonable that we will resolve all of these issues within less than a decade? I think that's a meaningful challenge. And I suspect that we will fall short. But if we set incremental goals and targets working to that date, I think we will have a meaningful impact as well as instil additional confidence in global society that this is not only something that we need to do, but it's feasible to complete and we're hopeful that it Ecovative were just one of the many solutions that can help resolve one or more of these challenges, be its food scarcity and protein accessibility in the human nutrition category and expand And seven regionally distributed building construction materials for housing. And then of course, the impacts of various pollution polluting industries that we hope to solve through nature.

WTiN
So moving on to the last round of questions, focus more on trend and insight and stuff like that, starting with What trends are you seeing an environment in the industry?

Gavin McIntyre
Some of the trends that I'm seeing in the industry really relate to authenticity and the claims that are being made around either existing and incumbent materials. There's far more scrutiny that's being paid toward the use of plastic and individual textiles and garments, and what it really means at end of life for those materials to end up in landfills. I think similarly, there's a big question around either fast fashion, or the durability of goods and the implication of those materials. And so I think there's certainly more attention being paid the unintended consequences of these industries, and the voice of customers is starting to drive brands to start to look for alternatives that can be better for the planet and better for their bottom line.

WTiN
But anyone who's listened to the podcast before will know that this is my favourite question to ask people, which is why I save it to last, what are the plans for the company in the future? What can we expect to see in the headlines soon about you?

Gavin McIntyre
So at this point, Ecovative and our sister company, my forest foods are growing incredibly rapid, a lot of new attention and positive market response for our entire family of products. So today, we're starting to stand up in commission to a number of vertical farms that serve categories ranging from protective packaging, both here in the United States, and also in Europe through partnerships with some of our partners, including the magical mushroom company based in the UK, not too far from where you sit, as well as in the Netherlands and beyond. And then of course, in our own operations, both partnering with mushroom farms and our own vertical farming, in which we are starting to scale up our air mycelium platform for applications and food, and apparel. And once we've demonstrated those markets, if we look out in the next five to 10 years, there are plenty of other fields that are currently dependent upon plastics or animal based products that we think we can serve with mushroom mycelium ranging from the Health and Beauty sectors all the way through to structural materials that could be used in a wide range of applications. And so we're really excited about this next wave of growth, about expanding our fantastic team and bringing these products to a scale of market where we can start to have a meaningful planetary impact.

WTiN
Wonderful. Thank you so much. That concludes the episode. Thank you so much for taking the time to speak with me about this. I am very excited to see what happens next with the company.

Gavin McIntyre
Thank you, Ruby. It's my pleasure. And thanks for the opportunity to have a chance to speak to you and your audience today.

WTiN
If you want to get in touch with Ecovative you can find them at foragers.bio, or you can reach out to Gavin himself at Gavin at forage adopt bio. If you have any questions for WTiN then you can reach out over Twitter, find us at WTiN_ comment or you can contact me directly at WTiN and if you fancy sponsoring an episode of the podcast, please email sales@wtin.com, thank you so much for listening and we'll see you next month.