According to UN statistics, since 1950, humans have produced more than 8.3 billion tons of plastics, most of which are disposed of in landfills and take centuries to break down.

Biotech startups from New York Ecovative wants to replace plastics with mushrooms to reduce pollution.

More precisely, the ecovative used to replace plastic is the mycelium in mushrooms.

Ecovative says that a new method has been developed to allow mycelium to grow into a specific shape and size.

First, they collect organic plant waste such as dead leaves and then inoculate the plant waste. After special treatment, the hyphae not only grow around the periphery of these plant wastes, but also wrap the waste, and can continue to intersperse between the internal gaps, and finally “bundle” the waste together.

According to them, the whole process takes only about a week, and the water and electricity consumed are very low.

When you no longer need these hygienic packaging, you bury it in your garden, which not only degrades, but even becomes a fertilizer in the soil.

At present, their solution to environmental problems has been favored by many large companies and investors such as 3M, and they have even signed a US$9.1 million contract with the US Department of Defense.

In an interview with CNN, a professor of biology at Clark University said that the emergence of these emerging materials is exciting enough to be economically viable.

In fact, mycelium is not the first time people have seen and made into materials. As early as 2017, British home designer Sebastian has tried to make homes using mycelium.

Sebastian combines mycelium with discarded willow wood in woodland to create a range of furniture products such as chairs, hangers, and chandelier shades, which are displayed at the London Design Festival.

Sebastian didn’t think of mycelium at first, she just wanted to find a natural material that could replace the glue and bind the wood together. The mycelium eventually showed much better results than she expected.

And for Ecovative, they are not the first to deal with mycelium. They used to belong to Atlast Food, a meat technology company, and have been trying to make bacon using mycelium.

When Ecovative is formally independent, replacing my plastic with mycelial material is only