Scientists Used Mushrooms To Invent a Plastic That’s Alive

Scientists are turning to something that’s been quietly fixing nature for billions of years: mushrooms.

A Swiss team at the Swiss Federal Laboratories for Materials Science and Technology, otherwise known as Empa, has bio-hacked a split-gill mushroom into a shape-shifting, plastic-like material that’s alive, sustainable, and durable.

It’s all thanks to Living Fiber Dispersion, a plastic-y material made from mycelia. Mycelia is the root-like web that mushrooms use to stretch and grow, eventually creating vast, complex underground mycelium networks.

But, unlike other mycelium-based materials that are rendered sterile before use, this stuff is left alive. It retains its full network of proteins, fibrous macromolecules, and all the squishy structural scaffolding fungi naturally make to protect themselves from the outside world.

So, yes. It is technically still alive. It doesn’t walk and talk, and shame you for not recycling it. It’s not plastic with a pulse. But it is as alive as any mushroom can be.

Empa’s researchers figured that if the mushroom already makes this protective biological mesh, why not just use that? By keeping the mycelium whole and active, the resulting material becomes not only biodegradable but also improves with age.

“This is probably the only type of emulsion that becomes more stable over time,” said researcher Ashutosh Sinha.

Scientists Just Created a Living Plastic Alternative

Dried into durable paper-thin sheets, LFD can replace plastic in things like reusable shopping bags. And because it’s made from edible fungi, it can be used in food-safe products. It might even one day be used as an all-natural emulsifier for sauces or cosmetics.

Perhaps most importantly, this development is another slap in the face of petroleum-based plastics, which have so thoroughly polluted the planet that they’re not only choking our oceans and littering our lands, but they’ve saturated every part of our bodies in the form of microplastics.

Mushrooms might just be the environmentally friendly everyday plastics of the future.