Packaging and panels grown from fungus and seaweed
Most of what protects a product in transit is made from oil, used once, and then buried. Expanded polystyrene is the clearest case. It is cheap, it is light, it works, and it will outlast everybody who has ever handled it.
The replacement does not come from a refinery. Ecovative in New York packs agricultural residue into a mould, adds fungal mycelium, and lets it grow. In about seven days the fungus has knitted the residue into a solid part that matches the shape of the mould. The part is then dried to stop the growth. It protects the product, and afterwards it composts in a garden rather than sitting in a landfill for five centuries.
Seaweed does the same work for film and coating. Notpla in London makes packaging from brown seaweed, which needs no fresh water, no fertiliser, and no arable land, and which grows faster than almost anything on a farm. The company reports that more than seven million single-use plastic items have been replaced by its material. Mogu in Italy takes the fungal route further and presses mycelium into acoustic panels and floor coverings for buildings, sold by the square metre.
Twelve algae entries and seven mycelium entries sit in the catalogue. Most of them already sell. The remaining question is volume, price, and whether a buyer will accept a material that is not perfectly uniform.
What growing changes
A grown material inverts the usual economics. A conventional plant is expensive to build and cheap to run, so the pressure is always to run it flat out and find somewhere to put the output. A growing operation is cheap to start and scales by adding another room, another tray, another mould. That suits a small producer near the customer far better than a single plant serving a continent, and it makes local supply a real option rather than a slogan.
The catch is time and tolerance. A grown part takes a week, and it will not be identical to the one beside it. Industrial buyers have spent a century removing exactly that variation from their supply chains. Every company in this part of the catalogue is therefore selling two things at once: a material, and a change in what the buyer accepts as normal.
We think the second sale is the harder one, and it is where an institute can help. A published tolerance standard, agreed across several producers, would let a buyer specify a grown material without inventing the test themselves. Nobody profits from writing that standard alone, which is precisely why it belongs in the commons.
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