How does your garden grow? I’m always looking out for stories that show innovation in green thinking especially when it involves taking something that might otherwise be discarded and putting it to good use. I would not have thought that the waste products from growing your own vegetables could be taken to a higher use other than composting but it seems I would have been very much mistaken.

A brand new product has now been launched that combines agricultural waste along with mushroom roots creates a bonded product that can be used in place of (and equally as well as) foam packing material. You’ve all seen the white packing peanuts that come in shipping boxes of course, well this invention of far more environmentally friendly almost to a remarkable degree. The composite result requires less than 15% of the energy to produce and generates just 10% of the carbon dioxide that would be needed to create the foam material now in widespread use. Often I read of a product that saves 10% here and 20% there in the production process, but this is truly remarkable in terms of positive impact. Even better the product is already proven to work and still being refined before being commercially launched.

Improvements will be needed as we’re dealing with living matter in terms of spores from the vegetation scraps. Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute undergraduates Gavin McIntyre and Eben Bayer are in the midst of creating a new and less energy dependent process to sterilize the agricultural waste. The goal being to ensure all spores from the material are killed which would otherwise compete with the mushrooms.  To replace the current process of steam heating , the new sterilization procedure will make use of cinnamon-bark oil, thyme oil, oregano oil and lemongrass oil. I’m not really one for science but McIntrye explains it better:

“The biological disinfection process simply emulates nature in that it uses compounds that plants have evolved over centuries to inhibit microbial growth, The unintended result is that our production floor smells like a pizza shop.”

To follow on from that is the added complexity of how the product actually grows. The vegetative part of a fungus, like a mushroom grow around and digest agricultural starter material, such as cotton seed or wood fiber in a dark environment maintained at room temperature. The product literally grows to task as they are shaped by a customized, molded plastic structure which will become the packing chip at the final step. I can’t find data however on just how long the process takes, but essentially you’d be farming packing materials. When the piece is fully formed, it will then go through the sterilization process that is required. Bayer and McIntyre feel that the entire process can be packaged as a kit which would allow businesses or even individuals to be able to then grow their own green packaging materials.

To learn much more visit the company Evocative Design created by McIntyre and Bayer Evocative Design of Green Island, N.Y. The company features other packaging materials made via the same process.