The IKEA company has recently announced that it will cease packaging any of its products in polystyrene plastics of any kind. While plastics are created from petroleum, the new biodegradable packaging, known as mycelium or “mushroom packaging” can actually be placed in your garden and yard and it will melt right into the soil and provide nutrients.
The gigantic furniture retailer, based in Sweden, will begin shipping all of their products in the new packaging which was developed by an American company called Ecovative. While plastic remains one of the great scourges of Earth, the new fungi based packaging seems a welcome addition and invention that, hopefully, many other companies and manufacturers will replicate.
Every year, humankind disposes around 14 million tons of non biodegradable plastics and polystyrene directly into the environment. It is killing the environment and millions of animals, especially birds, are eating the plastic and styrofoam to say nothing of the gigantic floating islands of plastic out in the world’s oceans.
The mycelium fungi grows and branches out like roots and attaches itself to its surroundings. The Ecovative company, based out of Troy, New York, takes the mycelium and allows it to attach itself and surround other farm waste such as corn husks that just get thrown away by farmers and consumers. The process is halted by allowing the huge new product to dry out or a few days. They can, then, be fashioned into bricks and molded to fit the requirements of a certain product or it ca be allowed to grow in a certain pre-molded way. The finished product is an actual weaving of the mycelium and the husks and it produces a fiberous packaging that has incredible strength.
Neither the corn husks or the fungi are harmful to the soil or the surrounding environment. It disappears in a matter of days. The material is beginning to get some traction as, besides IKEA, Dell Computers has been using the specially created material to provide cushions for their corporate servers.
PHOTO CREDIT: Ecovative