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Magical Mushroom – Europe's first industrial-scale mycelium packaging producer
by microflash
Just a side note. I started growing mushrooms a couple of years ago.
Very interesting and fulfilling hobby, they are incredibly interesting critters. Takes a little bit of dedication to get started but once you start seeing them fruit and making your own substrate it's quite inexpensive and a lot of fun. I have a feeling lots of folks in this community would really like it.
Basic starter package is a 'monotub', selection of spores, grain for spawning, substrate for fruiting and miscellaneous bits and bobs for handling, hydrating, maintaining temps and cultivating. North Spore and Midwest Grow Kits are both reputable and reliable suppliers.
Tons of resources on YouTube as you might expect. One of my favorites is Southwest Mushrooms - https://www.youtube.com/@SouthwestMushrooms
Couple of pics of lions mane and pink oyster that I had sitting around - https://imgur.com/a/ubI3eWt
A thing I've been wondering, I might be completely lost in thinking about this, but do you know: If you grow mushrooms at home is there a risk that it spreads as kind of fungi to the building, furniture etc.?
I agree with the replies so far in that there isn't a major risk of the mushrooms spreading.
That said, it's not completely risk free and I think it's important for folks who decide to get into the hobby at least take a moment to think about it. If you have someone in the household that has respiratory issues, I think it would be worthwhile ensuring that you have good containment to prevent spores from circulating the home (or do it elsewhere). This is particularly true if you decide to scale up (which is natural once you have some success, it truly is fun).
Also the growing environment is subject to infection from whatever environmental molds/fungus/etc are around, so reasonable precautions should be taken when handling/disposing. Once you get your procedures down this is less of an issue but still something to keep in mind.
Personally I didn't do anything but very basic precautions and never had an issue.
Normally the risk of airborne spores taking over your growing material is much more likely than your (most of the time very selected and in no way adapted to the "normal" surroundings you try to grow them in) taking over your home. Keep in mind that almost all fungi like similar conditions and there are already loads of spores of fungi that are more adapted to your living conditions in the air.
Mushrooms are everywhere. There used to be a subreddit of "weird mushrooms" like growing out of people's couches or in the bathroom, etc. In all cases, this is a sign of rot due to water intrusion.
You can grow mushrooms at home, it is fun. The only risk is that the mushrooms with high spore production are not great to have in a closed residence, especially oyster mushrooms which produce very high spore loads. There are vendors who produce cultures of sporeless oyster which can be used to grow oyster mushrooms indoors.
Outdoors, at least in most temperate areas, you are limited to things like shitake on logs or winecaps. The latter are incredibly easy to grow, and very good taste wise, but they are temperamental and basically grow on their own schedule, infrequently.
For the curious: https://www.reddit.com/r/mushroomID/
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Nope. Edible mushrooms generally need similar conditions as mold/mildew/rot to grow, i.e. moisture, low light, and the right material -- though they tend to be pickier, and are less suited to human-adjacent conditions. So if you find mushrooms growing where they shouldn't, there's a much deeper moisture and mold issue.
+1
I started a few months ago and it’s a great hobby. It’s like low maintenance gardening that you can do all indoors. It’s very satisfying to watch something grow. I think my only reoccurring cost is the coco coir I use as a substrate and the wheat berries, which are both very cheap.
Is there any risk of wild, potentially dangerous, mushrooms colonizing your garden?
There is always a risk of things like this. For example, to make my winecap bed, I had to get a bunch of woodchips. There is no way woodchips that one will buy in bulk are not contaminated with the spores of other wood-eating fungus.
What you learn is how to positively identify the mushrooms you intend to produce/eat. It doesn't take long. I've only had alien mushrooms show up once.
On the other hand, the morels that seemed to come with a load of wood chips were great for the year or two we had them.
I tried growing a little wine cap bed once, and it hadn't gone well. Perhaps it was the chickens pecking at it, can't say. I do still get wine caps on occasion, but they have migrated to more far-flung parts of the yard.
"I've only had alien mushrooms show up once" gonna be my reassuring quote of the day, thanks : )
Do people ever try to irradiate or fumigate or however they’d treat the woodchips?
Maybe it would cost 10 times as much as the wood chips themselves… small batch spore bakeoffs…
Adding poisons (fumigation) is definitely not a good idea. In mushroom plants the compost/humus used to grow mushrooms is often steam boiled to sterilize it, to keep the yields high and the production safe from any dangerous contamination. It is seeded with the spores of the desired species afterwards.
I imagine it would require the bad spores to be carried with the good ones. Typically you get a slurry solution that you carry in distilled water, injecting your substrates. That would need to have the bad stuff in it as well.
Don’t they float in the air?
Wild spores and such yeah. When you purchase spores for the intent of growing them, you generally get a kit to mix them into a syringe or they already arrive in the syringe ready to be used. I tried growing some culinary strains and they generally come in the mail like that.
only spores I think
what do you use as a low-cost substrate? I think this would be something I'd be into, but the idea of buying 5lb bags to be delivered by UPS really kind of takes the magic out of it.
Depends on the species. For something easy to grow like oyster mushrooms, straw. Do decontaminate the straw. Cooking water or hydraulic lime water should work for that.
Certain species do better in different substrates, but for the ones I've grown coco coir (also suggested by holly01) works great. There are some additional bits you can add to improve results but it starts there. You can hydrate it with hot water in a 5 gallon bucket. There's lots of tutorials on YouTube.
Mycelium has been shown to colonize some of the most unexpected substrates - cigarette butts [1], sawdust, you name it.
https://circulareconomy.europa.eu/platform/en/good-practices...
Coco coir is very cheap and is what I use. If you want more of a project, you can make the inoculation jars and sterilize the grain yourself. That way you’ll be taking a spore/liquid culture syringe from a tiny blob of mycelium to a whole network of fruiting bodies. Doing that will also be much cheaper in the long run if you stick with the hobby
Coffee grounds
There are a few companies in this space, notably Ecovative, who have been trying to make mycelium-based packaging for almost two decades.
The problem is that it takes around 7 days for each piece of packaging to "grow", and the finished part is heavy and not compressible so it adds significant cost in manufacturing, storage and transit. And these costs don't get any better with scale.
For those reasons, mycelium packaging hasn't seen much adoption beyond being used as a marketing story for high-priced small goods. Environmentally forward companies have tended towards paper-based solutions like molded fiber.
Heavy?
Two packages made from mycelium can behave very differently because “mycelium composite” is a category, not a single recipe. Particle size, fibre content, and the ratio of substrate to mycelium all change density. Higher density generally brings higher compressive strength and better edge definition, but it also increases weight and can reduce the springy cushioning that protective packaging needs.
Sounds like this might be your area of expertise. For the rest of us, take a shoebox. How much ballpark extra weight we talkin’ to have a livable planet? (Maybe the mushrooms would be ~2x as heavy as standard shoeboxes for example, to meet existing spec.)
Or how about for the glasses box they show on the site in OP, or a plastic sleeve like Americans sell Oreo cookies in. Anybody have any guesses?
I've done some experiments with mycelium as a construction material, but I'm hardly an expert. Mycelium weighs anywhere between 50 and 950kg/m3. Usually you won't have mycelium as thin as cardboard, because you want use mycelium as a 3d buffer, replacing styrofoam. EPS (styrofoam) has densities of 15-30kg/m3. So while it's more sustainable it's also heavier.
Biodegradable foam packaging, as well has food containers, disposable cutlery, etc, has also been made from corn starch for decades.
I’m curious what the advantage of mycelium packaging is over these existing materials. Presumably, it’s not cheaper to produce? Is it mainly that the mycelium degrades faster and can be recycled more easily in home composting, etc? Or is this about creating “hard” plastic-like packaging that resists crushing, water, etc?
Like real mold on fiber or
No. Think what egg cartons are made of.
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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.
Reading the first sentence have me a lot of " Last of us" vibes. I hope she's doing ok :)
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.
I thought it was going to be about robot mushroom harvesting and packing, a competitor to companies like 4AG and Mycionics.
Yeah same, I'm kinda sad now it's only packaging.
That's a URL bait!
Any PR is good PR, I guess?
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.
In the old days, wood shaving and even popcorn were the packing material of choice.
The reason styrofoam is used is because it's cheaper (main) and it doesn't decompose when wet.
Molasses was cheap because it was the packing material for plate glass - which was only made in England. Place your plate glass in a barrel, fill it with molasses and you can ship it to North America. Just wash off the glass and you're good to go.
That’s wonderful so I want it to be true. Your comment is one of the top results on my search for more info!
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.
Well there are multiple types of molded paper inserts. Egg carton-type material on the cheap end, and that super smooth stuff that Apple uses on the other (these generally have additives in them - they aren't just paper). In terms of "premium"ness this sits in the middle.
Apple was using a cellulose foam mixed with a starch based biodegradable binder, one that was very slightly different from Paperfoam to save them money on licensing fees.
Now they just use 99% compressed cellulose with a few antistatic additives.
Even egg cartons look more premium than the pictures in TFA.
> Mushroom® Packaging, grown from natural mushroom mycelium and agricultural by-products …
How is Mushroom something you can put (r) after?
A trademark sets your brand apart from competitors. If your competitors are other brands of mushrooms, then "Mushroom" is too broad. But if you're trying to distinguish yourself from other brands of packaging, it might work.
If it got litigated and I were the judge, I'd be concerned they were trying to abuse trademark to get patent-like protection. In the narrow packaging market, another mushroom packaging competitor would have trouble talking about its product without mentioning the word "mushroom" and drawing the ire of Mushroom™ lawyers.
Disclaimer: lawyer law blah blah
Well, how is "Windows"?
Some mushrooms, like many oyster species, are saprotrophs and will grow on just about any waste organic material with enough cellulose.
Certainly dung. A common substrate for growing mushroom is a straw or shredded wood depending on the species plus manure.
Not certainly. A LARGE number of fungi grow just fine without manure. I think this is a common misconception since agaricus bisporus (portobello, bella, white, cremini, button) need it to grow well, and it is the most commonly human-grown fungus by a long shot.
Most commonly grown? What, no love for yeast?!
Ahh, true. Didn't think about that one.
It says it is the woody core of hemp.
Sounds like a thing you could just make paper and cardboard out of directly...
The hemp is part of the finished product, so its probably intentional they picked something so fibrous.
Per the webpage: "The mycelium binds the agricultural waste together, so it can be baked into durable protective packaging"
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.
Totally cool stuff.
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.
https://magicalmushroom.com/mushroom-packaging
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"
Dell have been using mycelium packaging for a while now - 2014 maybe? created in the US. Very interested to see this space go.
Dell (and IKEA, and others) source from Ecovative who have been working on this for a while: https://ecovative.com/
Nice, thanks for the link. Somehow, this weekend I’ve gone into the rabbit hole of mycelium packaging, a completely new and interesting topic for me. Need to check this out before my fascination wears off.
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.
https://magicalmushroom.com/mushroom-packaging
Under Features, it lists polystyrene products as what it replaces, not cardboard.
Cardboard is mostly renewable, it's the applications where we combine it with plastic where alternatives are needed.
This isn't different from cardboard. This is made from mushrooms, cardboard is made from trees. The real problem is plastics.
Truly green governments should outlaw plastic production and favour PLA bioplastics and this sort of thing. There's enough plastic in the ocean already.
Nice, similar to https://www.traceless.eu who are pioneering biopolymers from grain residue, fitting into existing machines and workflows.
They already supplied famous Rock am Ring festival with friespickers last year!
This looks like those rough cardboard inserts. Is it actually any better? Especially since they can use the lowest grade of recycled cardboard.
How flammable are these? I've seen mycelium leather substitutes before but from what I understand if even a single spark lands on it, it's likely to start a smoldering fire that will consume the whole thing. Basically the perfect tinder.
What’s a Class A Fire Rating?
Between Mycellium and intelligent networks communicating nodes and 'learning' (and solving mazes' and brain's microtubules with fractal frequencies, biology looks like advanced computing literally very ahead for its time compared to what we the humans were trying to achieve barey half a century ago.
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This seems like a nice stepping stone towards something cool, but having the forming happen at a dedicated facility seems to miss the point. The promise of this technology is that instead of:
- make packaging
-> ship to where product is packed
-> ship to consumer
-> ship to recycler
you can:
- grow packaging where product is packed
-> ship to consumer
- consumer composts it in their garden
That is, the packaging should just make one trip instead of three. Hopefully they eventually figure out how to make kits so that shippers can just grow the packaging around the actual product. The hard part will be ensuring that the biomass used as feedstock (likely a waste product from some process nearby to where the product is packed) is actually something that people want in their garden. Doable, but maybe not the kind of thing markets can be trusted to do on their own.
It sounds good but will this ever scale enough? Plastics are just so freaking cheap that anything that wants become a serious alternative (aside from being a marketing gimmick) needs to be very cheap. I honestly have my doubts but I'm excited that people are looking for alternatives
Going on a little PR adventure today are we?
This site is run by venture capitalists, I think it's part of the package as long as they don't pretend otherwise.
Yeah, I know it's just funny to see the coordinated effort across multiple sites.
Or, someone saw it on reddit, thought it was cool, and posted here? Aka classic going viral event, without anything nefarious.
Indeed, I stumbled upon it this weekend while searching for something completely unrelated. Thought this was neat stuff to share on HN.
By which time should we expect US administration to post a video on X about “good classic” plastic bags and ban in the US any attempt to replace them? :)
I love this. I'm assuming the company is looking for government subsidy to replace plastic in frequently disposed plastic packaging (like takeout containers or styrofoam packing)
Are these packagings edible?
Now if they can get a mushroom that eats plastic to use it as fuel to grow the mycelium that would be even better.
Very exciting!
Is it edible?
Maybe not by humans, but definitely by the various things living in your compost pile.
I like the web site. Using on mobile. Not as bland as most. I normally don't like animation but this one is done nicely.
cool
Sounds like a great product, but a tough name in a business messaging context. The Customer Acquisition Cost for people that missed business culture fit rules can be extraordinarily high.
Maybe some sort of additional corporate alias name with "Biocomposite" or "Sustainable" packaging related messaging. Also, one may want to contact Uline with a set of product sku that already fit generic shipping boxes for high-value items like wine bottles and laptop screens.
Have a great day =3
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how's this Europe's given factories (and all likeliness all else) is in UK?
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
> geographically, perhaps, not EU though
I figure that's why they said Europe's first industrial scale; not the EU's first industrial scale...
> how's this Europe's given factories (and all likeliness all else) is in UK?
You know that a company can own factories in other countries, yes?
So which company owns what, how about you read the homepage twice, and we can discuss the facts.
The UK is still in Europe, even if it's left the EU.
Thanks for the links ! Good to have an overview of the current crop turns out there is a factory near me
It’s written in the linked page:
“Europe's first industrial-scale mycelium packaging producer”.
EU <> Europe
Crafted by Rajat
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