Your House Could One Day Be Made of Fungus and Pee

While some research teams are figuring out how to 3D print a home or turn hemp into concrete, scientists in Montana are trying to replace cement entirely with bricks made out of mushrooms and bacteria.

The carbon dioxide emissions from the manufacturing of cement account for around 8 percent of annual CO2 emissions. If the cement manufacturing industry were a country, it’d be Earth’s third-worst polluter.

Chelsea Heveran and her lab of bioengineers, profiled by CNN, have figured out that mycelium, the spongy roots of fungus, make a great skeleton for building materials. If you kill it, mix it with a bacteria called Sporosarcina pasteurii, and feed that bacteria urea, an active chemical in urine and a common fertilizer, the microbes start excreting calcium carbonate.

That’s the same chalky white stuff found in seashells in your grandma’s bone health supplements. The process turns gooey fungus roots into bonelike bricks that very literally grow themselves.

Scientists Are Building Bricks Out of Fungus and Pee

So far, testing has shown that the microbes can stay alive and useful for four weeks. That’s way longer than previous attempts. The door to even more advanced bricks that can do all kinds of fascinating stuff, current concrete wouldn’t even dare to dream it could. Or, as senior author of the study, Chelsea Heveran explains:

“We’re really excited about our next work to ask the questions, ‘could we seal a crack in the material?’ Or ‘could we sense something using these bacteria?’ Like, imagine you had poor air quality in your building, and these bricks were your walls. Could they light up to (indicate) that?”

The material isn’t strong enough to build skyscrapers yet, but a small, one-story home? With another five to 10 more years of development, it should be possible.

There are caveats, like how it needs a lot more testing. Mycelium could trigger allergies, and engineers need to make sure the stuff can actually hold weight. But if the technology continues on its current path, we could all one day be living in eco-friendly mushroom homes with walls that can talk to us.