The Dutch company uses mycelium, a type of mushroom structure to replace plastic packaging. Their goal is to one day completely replace the toxic pollutant with this organic option.
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00:00What are the advantages of plastic packaging?
00:07Think about plastics. If you look in your garbage can at home, you will see mostly plastic.
00:12Packaging made of plastics is so omnipresent, we need to get an alternative for that.
00:17And mycelium packaging is an alternative.
00:19What is your name?
00:22My name is Jan, Jan Berbet, and I'm one of the co-founders of Grown Bio.
00:28My name is Arte Marais, I'm also the co-founder of Grown Bio.
00:31And Grown Bio is a company that literally does what it says, we grow products.
00:36It started five years ago.
00:38We were working in a project with a customer who was looking for packaging for mushrooms.
00:43And I read the word mushroom packaging somewhere, so I thought that is my answer.
00:47But my search led me to a company in New York called Ecovative.
00:52That can actually make packaging made of mushrooms and not packaging for mushrooms.
00:56The main ingredient of our products is mycelium.
00:59And mycelium is the root structure of a mushroom.
01:02The products we grow have very nice characteristics.
01:07They are lightweight, they have high insulation properties, they are strong and the end of life is super.
01:15You can compost them.
01:17Welcome to our factory. Let me give you a tour around.
01:22It all starts with the raw material.
01:24When we put the spores of the fungus into the raw material, it immediately starts growing.
01:31So therefore we had for another step, we designed the packaging to match the product it should protect.
01:42Next is growing it.
01:44We fill the molds with the material and then we put it in our special growing chambers.
01:49Where there is a nice climate, it's nice humidity, nice temperature.
01:53And the fungus starts to glue all that agricultural waste together in the shape we want.
01:59Then we have to stop the process because the fungus will eat everything away.
02:05And then we have no product anymore.
02:07So therefore we stop the process by drying it.
02:12After two days of growth, we are going to get it out of the tool.
02:16I'll show you.
02:20Growing mycelium products takes a week.
02:22And in our factory, currently we make 10,000 products a week.
02:26But the raw material of mycelium products is almost endless.
02:31Compare that to the oil we need for making plastics.
02:34Well, we all know it's limited.
02:37This year only, we already replaced 250,000 products of plastic by our mycelium products.
02:45Currently we make packaging, but we could also make insulation panels for houses.
02:49So we see different products coming from mycelium.
02:53We believe that we will replace traditional plastic products by mycelium and organic waste products more on a global scale.
03:01This product can be used anywhere in the world because anywhere in the world there is organic waste to be reused.