Myco-materials: Mushrooms beyond sauté
Jessica Lawson interviews Amanda Morgan.
Amanda Morgan. Nice Film Co.
Amanda Morgan is a mycologist, designer and waste solutions entrepreneur who founded ‘Fungi Solutions,’ a myco-cycling company that among other things, turns waste into mushrooms. She is also the founder of Mycelium Made, a company that makes made-to-order garments from myco-materials.
Amanda meets me on Zoom, we’re both in Melbourne on this cold and rainy day in June. Amanda joins me for an interview in anticipation of the Garden States Conference in December, where she will feature as one of the many amazing presenters.
In this inspirational interview, Amanda explains a range of complex mycological issues and describes some of the innovative projects on trial at Fungi Solutions. She explains processes like mycoremediation and describes a range of at home, myco-technologies that can be accessed by almost anyone.
We spend some time exploring emerging themes of sustainability, ethical mycology and the risks of commercialising these entities. Amanda also describes cultivating certain strains of Fungi as ‘kind of like herding cats,’ and somehow makes cigarette butts seem magical…
Your work is important for several reasons, most notably your concern for sustainability. Can you tell us more about the developments you’ve made around hard-to-decompose materials?
Thanks! So, Fungi Solutions was established to create opportunities from existing materials that would otherwise be going to landfill. So, we identified this as a challenging problem, and we're looking for ways to utilise fungi to harness some of those resources and give them a bit of a new life by re-bonding them together with mycelium, and in some cases, identifying challenging waste streams that had no other options but landfill and seeing if we might be able to utilise those streams with fungi.
So, one example of that is we began taking in cigarette butts five years ago. We were able to cultivate a strain of fungi on this material and adapt it over time to use it as a food source. We had the goal of seeing if we could harness the incredibly adaptive digestive system of these fungus species and use them to break down some of the remaining toxic components, assess what's leftover, and hopefully one day create a clean material by-product. Currently, that waste stream of discarded cigarette butts has no real viable options for recycling it, particularly because of the concerns around the leachates present. So, a lot of what our R&D department does is identifying new waste sources, pairing them up with the fungi species and trying to adapt those fungi over time to utilise this material.
“We began taking in cigarette butts five years ago. We were able to cultivate a strain of fungi on this material and adapt it over time to use it as a food source.”
That's amazing. How have you gone with the cigarette butt project, what have you discovered?
It's still early days for that pilot program, but we have had some very interesting early results. First is that fungi can use the cigarette filter and the remaining components as the food source. The filters are made from a material called cellulose acetate. This starts as a natural cellulose product that is effectively plasticized, in order to create a synthetic filter. The fungi can use their digestive system to break down the molecular chains of this material and utilise it as a food source.
Quite interestingly, they're able to, you know, digest this, this material. Initially, we started out sterilizing the substrate, which involved pressure cooking the cigarettes. This is a normal process you need to go through with many substrates, to create a nutritious and clean environment and prevent other competing species from growing on your material. We found out that you don't need to sterilize cigarette butts to inoculate them with mycelium. This is because nothing else wants to eat them.
Amanda growing mycelium. Nice Film Co.
Jessica: They’ve got no competition!?
Exactly! It’s quite remarkable, but the fungi can harness this waste source for food. We have then adapted this species over time. So, with each generation, they become, slightly more effective at breaking down cigarette butts. There's quite a broad range of additives in collection points to prevent fires, so, we must account for those chemicals as well.
The fungi can produce a fruiting body from growing on cigarette butts, so, there’s enough nutrition in there that they're able to thrive a little bit. We are expecting that the heavy metals present in the cigarettes will be bio-absorbed by the mycelium. We need to conduct further testing in this area, and we also, need to better understand what chemicals are remaining after the remediation process is conducted. So, since there are approximately 7000 chemicals present and a lot of them are toxic, it is quite a lengthy process to have the lab testing done. But the early results of the program look really promising. We've identified a couple of partners that we can work with to pursue that next stage of the program, which is conducting the testing.
“Mycoremediation is the process of using a fungi species to repair or detoxify either environments or materials…. It’s a field based on environmental repair and building resilience.”
You started to talk about it a little bit, but can you explain the term ‘mycoremediation’ in general and give some examples of its applications in your project?
Sure, mycoremediation is the process of using a fungi species to repair or detoxify either environments or materials. The way this process works is that fungi have very adaptive digestive systems that excrete enzymes externally through their root system, which is the mycelium network. So, they will grow into a material, assess whether it is it can be consumed, and then they will adapt their digestive enzymes to become more effective at accessing that food over time. So, I would say that the mechanism by which it works in terms of detoxifying a material. Petroleum, for example, has molecular bonds that cause it to behave the way it does, and the digestive system is breaking apart those bonds and creating a nontoxic material through that digestion.
The field of mycoremediation has shown some efficacy for tackling things like oil spills, chemical pollution, and toxic dyes, there's also been some research into the remediation of mining sites, for example. It’s a field based on environmental repair and building resilience. There are lots of considerations that go into this and some challenges as well. Cultivating fungi exclusively on our wastes and our toxic materials is possible, but difficult.
They're also living organisms and need to be respected when collaborating with them. They have requirements for food and shelter, and need a good environment to exist in as well. There’s that consideration when we're talking about remediation and how you do it on the scale of the environmental and pollution problems that we have. So, those are just some considerations around remediation and how it works. But there are some promising signs that we can collaborate with different species of fungi to tackle some environmental problems that we've generated.
You just referred to the idea that fungi are a living entity that needs to be collaborated with. Considering this, have you come across any ethical dilemmas working with them?
I had an interesting chat with another cultivator, Alijah Parker. We were on a panel recently, and she was explaining that much like humans, fungi have a need for a diverse diet as well, and they can quite literally die of boredom if you're feeding them the same thing over time. So, part of our sort of job as a cultivator is to work with the fungi, and their needs to produce the material and organic outcomes that we're looking for. So, being mindful of their nutrition profile, being mindful of their growing conditions, they need to be in clean environments with appropriate oxygen and humidity.
In terms of ethical considerations, it's an entirely new field, so I think it's really important to be having these conversations about how to work with other species and also, be good custodians of our environmental spaces. I think up to this point, we haven't been good caretakers of a lot of these environments. As a result, they're failing in health and failing in resilience, and fungi, are very much the same. I think there's a lot to learn from them in the mycelial networks, there's no such thing as waste material and I don't think we should think about resources in that way either. So, yeah, there are some ethical considerations and it's such a new field that there's not been a lot of groundwork laid down just yet.
“Like humans, fungi have a need for a diverse diet as well, and they can quite literally die of boredom if you’re feeding them the same thing over time.”
Are there species of fungi that work better than others for making materials like mushroom leather? From my understanding, each species has a bit of an ecological niche that they've evolved to grow on, but certain species like you said, can be trained to feed on different kinds of substrates like cigarette butts. Are there other species like mycelium that work better than others? Or is it totally up for exploration due to the vast amount of fungi species?
I would say yes, there's a huge amount of diversity in the species themselves and their material properties in terms of how the mycelium grows, and what their preferred food sources are. So, we find that there's a huge range of scope for exploration in terms of the species you're using, the substrate you're feeding them, and the cultivation conditions that you're providing can produce wildly different results. They’re very tenacious organisms, and they have a little bit of a mind of their own so, it’s kind of like herding cats, trying to cultivate consistent and reliable outcomes.
However, there are some species that I think would work better for some applications than others. A lot of people have had good success working with the Ganoderma, the fungi species. This is because they grow incredibly dense mycelium that produces a quite rubbery hide, which creates a nice surface, so, a lot of people have success with that species, for example, whereas other species may adapt more quickly to different food sources but not grow as robustly, so there’s a real broad range of outcomes that can be achieved, and I think it's good to keep in mind that the number of fungi species that have been described and recorded and cataloged scientifically is quite low compared to the expansive sort of ecosystem of fungi. I think there are a lot of opportunities for new applications and outcomes to be addressed. Here at Fungi Solutions, we primarily work with Australian species wherever possible. We think it's a really under-researched and underfunded area. So, we have a couple of, really cool fungi species, that for example, host two endangered fungi. So, we take them here to a culture library for experimentation and testing.
Innoculated material mould. Nice Film Co.
An endangered species, that's interesting... So what might indicate that a species is endangered considering they are pretty ‘underground’ and I would imagine may be hard to track down?
That’s a good point, fungi are quite hidden, so, they can be really difficult to study. For example, there is a species of fungi that Fungi4Land is working with. They’ve identified that this species called Tea-Tree Fingers which only remains in one or two areas in Australia and is under quite a lot of habitat pressure. We don't see this species a lot, but we think they could be crucial for that environmental ecosystem. They exist solely with one other fungi species. Those two need to be paired up. They're obligate host and parasite. Tea-Tree Fingers can't survive without their host species. So, its host is beginning the decomposition of dead wood, beginning that rotting process, and if that stage one is not present this endangered species of fungi can't thrive. So, they're often collaborators or working together or accessing different nutrient profiles in the same environment.
By cataloging both of those species together and keeping their DNA profiles and cultures in a lab, hopefully we’ll be able to better understand that ecosystem and hopefully do some conservation work around protecting those areas. If we’re losing habitats, we could be losing potential scientific breakthroughs by not having access to work with these fungi cultures.
“I think there’s a lot to learn from them in the mycelial networks, there’s no such thing as waste material and I don’t think we should think about resources in that way either.”
You also work with fungi in a design context. Can you explain a bit about the process of how fungi becomes a material?
When we're talking about making materials with mycelium or the fungi fruitbodies, it's relying on the structure of their root network. Mycelium, as it grows and looks for food in an environment, it's creating a dense web of root-like filaments to basically go searching for new food sources and begin that digestion process that we were talking about, the external digestion. So, because of the structure of this web, you're left with airy hollow spaces and intermeshing filaments that create an incredibly strongly bonded outcome. Fungi are going to grow as far as their food source, so, we take advantage of that by placing their food source into moulded forms, which will then allow their mycelium to grow into that form, consume that food source, and then once we are able to demold that, we're left with a fully molded composite material that is partially organic substrates and partially mycelium. This results in an incredibly lightweight, durable material that performs a bit like polystyrene. Somewhere between polystyrene and cork are the material properties that you're usually able to accomplish. It has some interesting additional properties like being highly fire retardant, acoustically and thermally insulating, and quite robust and durable, but still fully compostable at the end of use. You have the nice benefit of capturing the carbon from these resources that would have gone to landfill and sequestering it in these materials. Think of this material made as an alternative to plastics…and then at the end of life, those biological resources and nutrients are returned to the soil to improve soil health and condition.
And then there are other materials you can create with the fruit of the mushroom things like mushroom paper made the same way as traditional paper. You're making a kind of pulp material. This is ideal for mushrooms that have gone bad in the back of the fridge. You can sort of make a batch of paper from them instead of consuming them if you prefer. Then there are the leathers as well, which is a different material process, but they all take advantage of the fact that mycelium and mushrooms are very fibrous, and they want to bond together. They love creating little meshes of materials.
I'm thinking about the paper production example in comparison to the traditional paper industry. I suppose one of the benefits to using mushrooms to make say paper is that fungi have a very short life cycle, which I guess has its benefits in comparison to a tree. I wonder if there is risk of misusing this resource? Could it put us in a similar situation to that we are now with overlogging?
Like an extractive sort of system? Yeah. One of the things I like about the type of fungi cultivation we do is that it's exclusively only grown on waste sources that would otherwise go to landfill. So, you have the benefit where you're not really extracting any virgin materials. The cultivation process itself is quite low input. You can really set up the cultivation of mushrooms pretty much anywhere. They don't require lights, they don't require a lot of water and they don't really require energy either. I guess mycology as a field really sprang up in a lot of ways from people publishing guides and teaching people how to cultivate at home on very minimal resources. In general, I find that people that work with mushrooms are often very open-minded and very collaborative. Resource sharing just seems to be a core part of mycology as a whole. It would be such a shame for such a powerful technology to be gatekept or kept only for people that have access to, you know, lab equipment and that sort of thing. I’m big on fostering this sort of collaborative open-source community around mushroom cultivation, with the goal of moving away from that more expressive sort of mindset and linear material production. I just think there are ways that we can reframe our thinking and learn from fungi. But of course, there's always the opportunity for people to use these technologies poorly, I would say.
Mycelium and nutrients. Nice Film Co.
We're seeing a lot of companies in say the psychedelic corner of the market adopting patents on technologies and even compounds. This kind of practice promotes a gatekeeping mentality perhaps, and I wonder is that happening with myco-technologies as well?
Yes. Yes, it certainly is, which I think is a real shame because it's really limiting the impact that can be created and I think that's the most important and exciting thing about this sort of technology. Though a lot of people are doing their own research and sharing freely and encouraging this collaborative space. But for sure there are also people that are looking at it from a commercial mindset. That could be short-sighted. It's not the approach we like to take within our organisation. We just think there's so much potential for good and so much work to be done. I don't think there's a shortage of the need for materials and technology to be developed and innovated.
“I find that people that work with mushrooms are often very open-minded and very collaborative. Resource sharing just seems to be a core part of mycology as a whole.”
You talked about being encouraging and collaborative. Mycological practices are quite accessible and there is a tradition of DIY culture. For example, many people have small home labs now - which you know is a big part of this community. A few years ago, you featured in a short documentary Mycelium Made, and you talked a little bit about creating a community space, that citizen mycologists could access. Is that still happening?
OK. Beautiful. So, Mycelium Made. In 2019 we partnered up with Nice Film Co. to film Mycelium Made. That was just the very start of the project where I was looking at recycling textiles with fungi at the time. We also had the opportunity to get involved with setting up an organisation called MYCOmmunity. A couple of other members of MYCOmmunity established the board and the goal there was to create a citizen science organisation and allow people to have access to resources, education and experts in the field to get involved with mycology, whether they had access to equipment or not. So, it was about facilitating learning and advancements in mycology in Australia and providing that supportive community space for people to get excited and involved with mushroom projects. So, that organisation has been running for, I think four years now. I'm no longer on the board. I had to step back to work on fungi solutions when it was established, but MYCOmmunity live in the building with us, so, we're still working closely together.
It's nice because we are able to host workshops and events and run seminars here and conduct some of that citizen science research as well. So, they currently live in our pilot facility, which is really nice to sort of see the organisations work together. We also have a bit of contact with Fungi4Land as well that's run by Sapphire McFish. So it's nice having a building full of people really excited about mycology and doing really interesting projects and research.
Other than this how can people participate in this mycological movement? For example, I'm wondering if you could provide some examples of how people could participate in myco-cycling behaviors at a home level?
Yeah, that's a great question. So, by picking up some basic cultivation skills, people can convert some readily available resources that they usually have floating around at home and use those to grow their own culinary mushrooms. So, an example resource might be cardboard, cardboard from any packaging or shipping. It’s ideal to use cardboard that doesn't have printing on it. Where possible, you don't want the inks, you just want the nice, cellulose material. It's possible to pasteurize that material, and introduce some fungal spores, either through store-bought mushrooms, (they'll drop spores from the gills) or by buying a starter culture. You simply add that to something like your hydrated cardboard in a plastic container and over time, the mycelium will go through that cardboard and when introduced to fruiting conditions, you'll be able to produce culinary and edible mushrooms at home just from things lying around. So, there's a huge range of materials that could potentially be used. We’re talking about anything that is cellulose-based or natural fibers. We’re talking natural cotton and linen, food scraps, paper and cardboard, sawdust and woodchips… these are all viable mediums for cultivating fungi on. Picking up some basic cultivation skills can just allow you to have this happening in your home, and myco-cycling these materials has the nice benefit of producing edible mushrooms. You can also reduce the strain on your landfill and recycling systems and then at the end of the day, compost these materials back into your garden and improve the soil nutrition there. You don't need much space, you don't need light. Some basic and easily accessible supplies will do a lot to get you started. There's lots of low-tech DIY ways that people cultivate mushrooms.
A tile made from myco-materials. Nice Film Co.
You’re presenting at the Entheogenisis Australis, Garden States Conference in December. What do you think are the common goals between your work and the conference mission?
That's such a good question. For me, it's about introducing people to the real opportunity that we have from working with fungi and changing our mindsets to learning from them. So, to start with, I like to broaden people's perspectives on fungi as an organism and how we can work with them. I guess bringing some of the excitement and the hope for tackling some of our challenges using mushrooms and then providing some resources for people that would like to get involved further or learn more. I usually bring along material samples with me as well for anyone that would like to get more hands-on with the resources and see how they perform. I'm always happy to field questions from people about the technology, how it works, and how we sort of see this industry expanding in Australia. So, I think Garden States 2022 will be a nice environment for learning, viewing information, and making a shift to the sort of future and collaborative world legacy that we’d all really like and figure out how we get that together. So, that’s what I'm really excited for, for the conference.