Mycelial Buildings with Christopher Maurer
Alisa Nappa
Today we sit down with Christopher Maurer to talk about building mycelial homes in Namibia, Cleveland and even Mars. Transforming invasive plants into homes in Namibia, toxic construction waste into homes in Cleveland, and high tech materials into astronaut homes on Mars is just the start. Tune in to the future of building on todays episode.
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TRANSCRIPT
Unknown Speaker 0:11
Welcome, welcome, you are listening to the mushroom revival podcast. I'm your host, Alex Dora. And we are absolutely obsessed with a wonderful, wacky, mysterious world of mushrooms and fungi. We bring on guests and experts from all around the world to geek out with us and go down this mysterious rabbit hole to try to figure out what the heck is going on with these mushroom, fungal beings. And geek out with all these experts, diminishes all the really cool things that they're doing with fungi and mushrooms. So we brought in Chris to talk about mycelial building, all around the world and outside of our world. So, Chris, how you doing? I'm doing well. Thanks for having me. So for people who don't know you and all the interesting projects that you're up to one cheek, give a little intro and on all your fun mushroom happenings. Okay. My name is Chris Mauer. I'm an architect. I'm based in Cleveland, Ohio, I have a small studio here called Red House. We specialize in next generation biomaterials and architecture, or basically, you know, to say in another way, we were growing buildings. And I use that word biomaterial there, that's, that's any kind of material that actually uses the growth of an organism in its manufacture. And fungi are, of course, our favorite kingdom to work with. And so that's why we're talking to you all today.
Unknown Speaker 1:38
That's amazing. And I just wanted to give a disclaimer, I
Unknown Speaker 1:42
arrived from the airport from my trip to Ecuador early this morning, and I didn't get much sleep. So
Unknown Speaker 1:50
I have a little less brain cells than usual. But this, I'm excited for this conversation. And I'm putting all my brain cells to work for this. So if my voice sounds a little tired, that's that's probably why but how did you originally get into mushrooms and fungi and weaving them into architecture? Yeah. So as I mentioned, I'm an architect. And I worked for a number of years in Africa, both in Malawi and in Rwanda. And there, the main focus of our work was really looking at how can we leverage limited resources. And that was by necessity, really, but also, the idea that we could leverage the construction process to make as much positive impact as possible. And that was just kind of our mission. And so we did many projects that use alternative materials, but it was mostly things like Earth construction, which includes rammed earth, or compressed stabilized earth blocks that we did for a number of projects. And then when I repeat, repatriated to the US, I saw folks like Ecovative, working with fungi for packaging materials. And, you know, Phil Ross, making architectural Scout sculptures out of fungi. And so I wanted to learn more about, you know, this concept of myco texture that that was being kind of thrown around as a concept. And so I looked into, you know, how that was done. In having just come from Africa, I thought there must be a way to make food and housing at the same time, because it's pretty much the same process, right? You're growing the mycelium to create mushrooms if you're a cultivator. But a lot of these, you know, biotech companies were just growing the mycelium to make materials. And I wanted to see if there was some way to integrate that, again, to leverage that process to make as much positive impact as possible.
Unknown Speaker 3:44
And so, you know, since nobody was really doing that, I kind of learned how to do it myself and learn how to cultivate mushrooms. And then I took the waste from that mushroom cultivation process and started turning that into useful materials. You know, the first that most people are looking at right now is insulation materials, because fungi can serve as a really good insulator, you know, by nature of how fluffy the material is, how much air is and trapped in the material, that those really make good insulators. But the more we looked into it, we saw that there was all these multifunctional capabilities in the materials and that includes, you know, things like if you compact the material, you can make a very strong material. So we, we were thinking, you know, Can we can we create a process that actually turns us into the structure of a building and creates mushrooms at the same time and that's kind of my, my first investigations into to, you know, what you can do with myco texture or how fungi can be part of the built environment.
Unknown Speaker 4:49
When you were in Rwanda, did you have the privilege to go over all those speed bumps?
Unknown Speaker 4:55
Yeah, well, actually, Uganda is the worst for the speed bumps when
Unknown Speaker 4:59
you give them a hard
Unknown Speaker 5:00
Time, you know, like, what, what are these four, I found if you since there's a whole bunch of them,
Unknown Speaker 5:05
you know, put together in a series I found if you go really, really fast, it's more like rumble strips and speed bumps. And so that's served us well a few times when we're in a hurry. Nice. Yeah, yeah, I took the drive from Uganda to Rwanda Oh, many, many years ago. And it was, I think it's the longest strip of speed bumps in the world. It was a fun time I think was the longest between that and potholes. It was a bumpy ride, for sure. It's very memorable that I was driving rental cars when we went.
Unknown Speaker 5:37
That's funny. So So tell me about myco Hab. Okay, so yeah, myco have is basically you know, that the the company that's now come out of that concept of, you know, can we turn a waste material, any kind of agricultural waste into food and housing at the same time. And so myco have uses fungi to convert Namibian encroach, or Bush into food and housing. So we use a bush that is leading to desertification in Namibia. This is something that the government of Namibia wants to get rid of that not completely, but they want to thin it back to the pre colonial stakes to the more appropriate land management of having a small amount of bush and but mostly grasslands. Because this bush is kind of absorbing all the water in the groundwater. And so we take that bush, and we chip at it up into small pieces like sawdust, and then we use that as a stub substrate for growing gourmet mushrooms. And then those mushrooms are harvested, they're taken to market they feed people this is, you know, food. And in this scenario, you know, the food is sacred. And so I push back on people that say we're building out of mushrooms, we're actually building out of the waste from the mushroom cultivation, because those mushrooms go to market. And then we take the waste, which is the mycelium that has bound together all the little parts of Bush into, you know, a composite material. And we put that into a press that we had designed and built in Namibia. And that press actually, you know, compacts them into blocks that are as strong as concrete, as heavy as concrete. But
Unknown Speaker 7:24
Alternatively, they actually serve as an installation. And very importantly, for this process, they actually store carbon dioxide rather than emit carbon dioxide. For every pound of material we make, we can actually keep one pound of carbon dioxide from going into the atmosphere, whereas concrete emits one pound of carbon dioxide for every pound of material that is made. So it's kind of flipping that on on its head. And you know, if we saw a scenario where we could
Unknown Speaker 7:55
proliferate technology like this, then there there is a possibility of actually leveraging the construction process to be a force for good when it comes to greenhouse gas emissions.
Unknown Speaker 8:08
And tell me more about this in this bush, where did it come from Germany during the colonization of Namibia, or from South Africa or where? What's the story? The bush? Okay, yeah, good question. A lot of folks, you know, we'll we'll call it an invasive species. And that's, it's kind of a misnomer to say that, it's, it's actually an indigenous plant, but the, it's grown out of control, basically, because of different land management practices that happened during colonial era. And that's basically, you know, people put up fences, they, you know, started prioritizing the land for cattle rather than the, you know, wildlife that had been there in the past. They killed large animals like elephants that used to trample the bush animals that used to graze and brows on the bush, that would keep it under control. And very importantly, they started killing predators, because obviously, they wanted to protect their cattle. And that just upset the whole ecosystem in general, which gave this bush an advantage that it didn't have before. So it's called encroach, or Bush, it's a black thorn bush. The Latin name for it is Acacia mellifera. But it's not technically an invasive species. But you might think of it that way in the fact that it's just growing out of control because of, you know, the impact that human beings have had on the environment. We're really good at that. Yeah.
Unknown Speaker 9:35
I just hear this same story, but just you know, different variables, and pretty much everywhere around the world of humans came in, you know, they kill one species, or they did this and then you know, another species goes wildly out of control.
Unknown Speaker 9:49
Yeah, I wish we had other better talents, but that seems to be our number one.
Unknown Speaker 9:55
It's a pain point for me as an architect I you know, I always look at architecture
Unknown Speaker 10:00
or, and see kind of the impact that it's had. And, you know, there's no doubt that that it's been mostly a force for destruction when it comes to the ecosystems. And, and that's where I think, you know, the biomaterials are actually working with nature
Unknown Speaker 10:13
to become a regenerative material is starting to turn the conversation the other direction by, you know, having a process that actually helps thin this bush converts it into something that's now carbon dioxide storing. And then the waste from this material, when we you know, basically when it comes to the end of life in this building, that all of the materials that we make, can be composted. So that can actually augment the soil rather than, you know, fill up landfills. And in a place like Namibia, that, you know, soils are pretty poor, to have all of this organic material that then can be composted at the end of the day, is a net benefit. And, you know, in addition to the, the the land regeneration that comes from thinning the bush, so why Namibia, how did you get connected with this?
Unknown Speaker 11:03
Yeah, so we started this work with MIT's Center for Bits and Atoms and Standard Bank Group. And that's, that's Africa's largest bank, Standard Bank sponsored MIT, MIT hired my studio Redhouse, who had this concept in place, and we, you know, we work together and looked at all of the, you know, 20, some sub Saharan African countries that Standard Bank is working in. And they selected Namibia out of those countries.
Unknown Speaker 11:37
Because there were there's great need for the humanitarian Housing and Sustainable Food.
Unknown Speaker 11:43
And because of the leadership that they had in Namibia, at that time, so all of their all of the countries they work at have, you know, basically subsidiaries and Standard Bank, Namibia was, you know, deemed the best out of all of these, because they had the tracks laid for a humanitarian housing project, which was perfect for what we're doing here. We didn't know until we got there about the bush and Crutcher problem. And that just ended up making it a perfect fit for this. But anywhere you go really in the world, there's always going to be an agricultural waste. That you know, that's something that is a plant that is stored carbon is drawn down carbon from its lifecycle of growing and then either is underutilized, which means it'll decay and release that carbon dioxide into the environment. Or in many cases, it's burned. Like the the bad gas or the waste from sugarcane farming is commonly burned or pom poms from the date palm farming are commonly burn, this bush is actually commonly burned. And so that's where we get our carbon capture claims, is because normally this bush would just, you know, be demolished and either release that into the environment through decay or through this burning process. And when we turn it into building materials, were actually locking that away. Long term for for storage. And so that keeps the carbon dioxide from being re released into the environment.
Unknown Speaker 13:10
Yeah, no, maybe it's a cool place I really want to go. I read a couple of stories of I think it's the it was reading an article How
Unknown Speaker 13:23
I think it's the one country that has the most people furthest away from the coast.
Unknown Speaker 13:30
Usually, you know, when when you have a coastal country, you have you know, being by the coast is really kind of revered people want to live by the water. But the whole Namib Desert makes that kind of impossible. And you can't build a dock for a really long time. And so there's only like a couple of shipping
Unknown Speaker 13:52
ports because the sand is just like it's it's impossible to really build something
Unknown Speaker 13:59
on the water. So I don't know if you've seen pictures or seen it in person, but the the shipwreck
Unknown Speaker 14:05
Coast just you know, ship get crushed on the Coast Coast in this long strip of Namibia. They're kind of like, there's nothing you can really do. And so there's tons and tons of ships. Such a really interesting environment.
Unknown Speaker 14:21
But insanely beautiful. I mean, the Namib Desert, just pictures online, just like insanely beautiful and
Unknown Speaker 14:29
yeah, it's absolutely yeah, I love it. They're in Yeah, to your point, the Skeleton Coast up and down the coast is almost all you know, just sand dunes, you know, these beautiful, beautiful sand dunes that you know, are great to kind of take in as far as landscape but very, very harsh environment that you know, is almost impossible to live in.
Unknown Speaker 14:50
And I think most of the population is along the Angolan
Unknown Speaker 14:54
border towards the north. And that's when it starts to get a little bit more tropical and you know,
Unknown Speaker 15:00
The lands more fertile. There's, you know, lots of wildlife refuge that still exists in the, you know, the desert part of it and, you know, fantastic place to visit to, to see all of these things, you get the coast and you get the mountains and you get these grasslands with,
Unknown Speaker 15:16
you know, wildlife that there's just stunning. The ecosystems are fantastic. So I can't recommend you know that that's another reason for Namibia obviously. But that wasn't what it necessarily played into the the calculus for the best country of the 27th that Standard Bank was was working with. But I had spent some time there before this project started and always always wanted to go back in this, you know, this was a great opportunity to allow that to happen. Yeah, my, one of my best friends of all time, she almost moved with her family to Namibia. And so I went down like a little Namibia rabbit hole like a year ago and forgot most of the stuff that I researched. But it it seems like a really beautiful place. So you're lucky you get to visit and I'm just curious about the project, or the process of making these myco bricks.
Unknown Speaker 16:10
What what tools and resources that you're using to make them is? Yeah, just walk like, if you could walk, walk me through the steps of it. This steps will be familiar to your listeners that are mushroom cultivators, you know, at least the first part of this, you know, what we do is we take the encroach, or Bush it gets chipped up into very small pieces like sawdust, then those get put into different containers and are pasteurized, so we basically put them in a big rice cooker, you know, something that brings the the wet temperature of the environment up to close to if not 100 degrees Celsius or right around the boiling point of water to kind of kill all of the organisms that are already on things like sod dusty, you know, just by nature of them, of organisms being on everything. So we pasteurize that we let that cool. And then we inoculate them with fungal mycelium. This is grains bond that you know many of your listeners probably know about. But what it is is a little bit of mycelium that's growing on
Unknown Speaker 17:14
grains, you know things like wheat or rye berries that have been inoculated in a laboratory to have the mycelium be the only organism growing on that. And then by transferring that to the bulk substrate, which is this, these chipped up pieces of the bush, that mycelium grows through all of those particles of the bush in a you know grid like matrix that they binds with these materials that secretes enzymes and dissolves the the woody material and then kind of converts that into its own own organism. So it's the way that fungi turn lignocellulosic woody material into Titanus fungal material and it's a bit of an external digestion that converts one you know biomass into another and then you know after that's happened for what basically we will put those into shipping, insulated shipping containers. And these are, you know, our grow rooms where the mycelium is able to grow you know for two weeks and the dark basically doesn't need anything at all really just the constant temperature to keep the organisms from dying but they grow rather quickly and then they're moved to a another container that has high humidity. We puncture small holes into the containers and then the mushrooms just start to erupt from these. These bags that are full of the mycelium and the mushrooms are easily harvested just by picking them. And then what's left over that waste material which is mycelium and the bush composite that's basically kind of transferred again the biomass from woody material to fungal material. And that is collected and put it into a specially designed press that we designed and built in Namibia.
Unknown Speaker 19:08
And the press pushes that myco composite or that mycelium composite into specially made metal boxes. And then these boxes are sealed, keeping that material under that pressure. And then that pressurized box is put into a a oven that we that we also had fabricated in Namibia, it's a modified shipping container. Were able to cook 100 to 100 or so of these blocks at one time and in a large shipping container. And then the following morning the blocks are extracted and they're ready for building. So again, it's just growing the mushrooms harvesting the mushrooms taking the waste, compacting it and then cooking it and then the next day it's ready to go. The whole process takes we say 30 plus one days. It's 30 days for the agricultural process. So from going from seed to
Unknown Speaker 20:00
Um, you know, our final harvest of the mushrooms, that takes 30 days, which is incredibly quick for an agricultural process, and then going from the
Unknown Speaker 20:09
the waste material into a block it takes one more day. So it depends on how you look at it. Do you want to think of this from like spore to block, it's 31 days. But if you think of it from the end of the agricultural process, it's less than a day that it becomes a block ready for building? Well, I'm, I'm really glad that you are also growing the mushrooms as well, because I was just thinking in my head, like, wow, that's a lot of work just to make one mushroom brick, you need to shipping containers and you need all you know, like you the training you need to lab to make grain spawn all this stuff. But if you're making a whole mushroom farm and feeding people at the same time, then this is just a byproduct of that. That seems to make a lot more sense. And yeah, and so I'm guessing oyster mushrooms, maybe something different? Yeah, that's right. Yeah, what we're doing in Namibia is we're growing oyster mushrooms.
Unknown Speaker 21:03
And yeah, we do have other processes where we're using. And in that country, we're actually still looking at using reishi Mushrooms for exports. But as far as like fresh produce to the market, the oyster mushrooms are, are the best of you know, all of the different metrics, we need the food and the building material. When it comes to strength of material, we actually find that the reishi Mushrooms are they create stronger blocks. There's no market for reishi in Namibia. So we're look we're kind of putting that on the back burner to, to when we get exports, rolling. And we'll be selling those teas, you know, in the developed world, places like USA and South Africa. And you know, you're
Unknown Speaker 21:49
cool. And what are some other long term visions of this project?
Unknown Speaker 21:55
Okay, yeah, so we want to, you know, basically what we've done with myco hub so far is to prove that we can turn the bush into food and housing at the same time, as you mentioned, this is kind of a laborious process to get from one, one spot to the other. You know, our goal is to automate this to scale this up into a way that what we can do is, you know, start to replace all other building materials, we want this and other carbon storing biotechnical processes to replace all others. You know, buildings are responsible for 40% of global greenhouse gas emissions. concrete, steel and aluminum alone, are responsible for 23% of total greenhouse gas emissions. If we start to replace those things with these carbon storing processes, then we we may have a chance to get to net zero carbon. By mid century like the Paris accord demands of us. Right now, the construction industry is on track to double all buildings on the planet by 2060. So think of every building on the planet right now. And then just double that, according to the Gates Foundation. That means we'll need to build one New York City worth of buildings every month, for the next 40 years. And we just can't simply do that with the building technology of today, it will completely exacerbate the climate crisis that is requiring us to get to net zero. So we want to you know, automate this to scale this up to take it all all around the world to work with other biomaterial companies that are using things like algae and other micro organisms to sequester carbon in the same manufacturing process. And then we can really look at leveraging architecture and building in a way that that can turn the dial the other direction when it comes to greenhouse gases.
Unknown Speaker 23:50
And,
Unknown Speaker 23:52
you know, for for sake of time, I have like a million questions just on that project alone. But, but you're, you're out to have a ton of other projects. So tell me about bio cycler. Okay, so one of the other, you know, bio performative things that fungi can do in addition to, you know, transferring biomass into ways that can store carbon in a positive way is bio remediation, or in the case of fungi, it's called myco remediation. And so, bio cycler is similar to myco hab, but it instead of turning the waste material into food and housing, what we're doing with bio cyclers, we're taking construction and demolition waste. We're using fungi to recycle and remediate that into new building materials. So here the equation is, you know, waste material equals remediation and building materials instead of food and building materials. And it's a real
Unknown Speaker 24:51
effort to address environmental justice or environmental injustice. I guess it's probably a better way to, to think about it.
Unknown Speaker 25:00
Um, you know, here in Cleveland, Ohio, we have a lot of crumbling infrastructure. And, you know, most of it is in
Unknown Speaker 25:10
private primarily, and communities of color. And that's, you know, because of decades, centuries and millennia, you know, you name it, have racist practices and, you know,
Unknown Speaker 25:23
industry and banking and city planning that have, you know, continually put communities of color in harm's way. And so we see that there's they're four times the incidences of lead poisoning here in Cleveland, Ohio than there are nationwide, it's actually worse here than Flint, Michigan, which, you know, folks are very aware of, because in
Unknown Speaker 25:47
the last decade, there was a lot of
Unknown Speaker 25:50
lead poisoning that was happening because of the water supply here, it's not the water supply that's causing it, it's actually the homes that people live in. And that is, that is the main source of lead poisoning in the country, more than around 80% of it is actually caused by lead, paint dust that's in the home, whereas, you know, 20% or less are caused by water. So as we're addressing lead pipes, in our in our plumbing, that's, that's a huge benefit. But the real insidious cause of lead poisoning in our children is from the homes they live in. In Cleveland, having this crumbling infrastructure kind of makes this you know, ground zero for for the lead epidemic. And so what we're looking at doing is using this recycling process to clean playing the built environment to take these homes and literally recycle them into something that's safe. And we found that this can work in a couple of different levels. You first you have the enzymatic action of the fungi as they digest things, they can break down long molecule chains, things like petrochemicals, polycyclic, arrow, Matic hydrocarbons, pH is which are really strongly bonded types of molecules, but the fungi are actually able to break those down. Because these, these petrochemicals were at one point,
Unknown Speaker 27:13
living organisms, they were wood, they just have been converted into this new thing, but with time and pressure, but fungi still thought finds a way to break that down. So we can look at the enzymatic action to break down these long molecule chains and petrochemicals. But when it comes to the elemental toxins, things like heavy metal, including lead and cadmium, and arsenic, which are for who Who knows why purposely put into the built environment.
Unknown Speaker 27:41
Through bad practices of industry, we have to do something different. So we can't break that down any further. Because it's an element, it's an atom, what you have to do is, you know, kind of the opposite, you have to pair them with longer molecule chains, and a process called chelation. So there are specific molecules that can latch on to these heavy metals. In one, they can filter them out easily. And then to the the molecules that are latched onto them become biologically unavailable. And so if you've ever known anyone that's had lead poisoning, they go through a process called Lead are chelation therapy, which they ingest some chemicals that latch onto the lead particles in their bloodstream, and it's safely passed through their urinary tract. So this is basically looking at it, can we do that before, this becomes part of the foodweb and that's not just people that includes, you know, insects and vermin that then go up the food chain, we need to basically
Unknown Speaker 28:45
totally neutralize the these toxins because even if they aren't, you know, poisoning children, when they're in the soil, they're poisoning these other animals and getting into the food chain, they're getting into our water supply. In even if they're disposed of which, you know, normally, they would just go to a landfill, they're still getting into the, into the water table, through the leaching process there. So we you know, not only do we want to make these things safe in their use going forward, but we want to make them safe in their disposal. And we're doing lots of research right now to find out can we actually keep that that lead from being leached out of a simulated landfill, using various processes that are assigned by the EPA to simulate that process, and to actually keep that lead from becoming part of, you know, the, the environment after after its end of life as well. So that, you know, that's probably a long explanation for bio cycler. But you know, the the idea here is to utilize fungi to remediate toxic homes into healthy homes. And you know, if I could just paint a picture for you imagine like a Dr. Seuss machine or Willy Wonka.
Unknown Speaker 30:00
scene where you take, you know, an old house and you put it into a meat grinder and it fits out on the other side is like a fully formed Palladian Villa at the end of the day, that's our, that's our long term goal for this but in in the meantime we are able to, you know, turn these dangerous materials into safe materials using fungi.
Unknown Speaker 30:21
So, you know, usually before a House is knocked down, you get to walk through it and you know, pretty much take out whatever you want, from copper wires to appliances to any fixtures, whatever you want to take out before they knock it down. Then when they knock it down, they just basically take it to the landfill.
Unknown Speaker 30:42
But there's obviously a lot of things in the house that fungi can't break down, right? I mean, even even the plastic light fixtures, you know what I mean by ghee, or even just the the switch itself is made out of, I'm guessing polypropylene number five, but it probably polyethylene or something. But there's tons of plastic and house or even just like metal in the walls of the house? And you know,
Unknown Speaker 31:08
and yeah, so like, what what is the process?
Unknown Speaker 31:14
Either currently? Or do you envision? Is it going down pre like going through a house pre knocked down and taking out anything that fungi can't break down? And then tearing down the house and collecting it all? And doing that? Or is there a filtering process post breakdown? Or how would that work? Yeah, right now the the filtering process becomes a, you know, huge part of the upfront
Unknown Speaker 31:39
process of that,
Unknown Speaker 31:42
you know, the the Willy Wonka machine is kind of, you know, a futuristic scenario, when, you know, we found the right organisms that can do everything. But right now that that process of sorting already happens with demolition in a way that often the woody materials are separated out. And sometimes they're turned into mulch, for gardens and things like that. And
Unknown Speaker 32:05
there's not always caretaking to make sure that that that mulch won't include any of these heavy metals, or any of that it's kind of scary to
Unknown Speaker 32:15
wonder what do you know, starting off with it'd be to take that mulching material and divert that from going into people's gardens and go through this process, first, turn it into something that that's then safe. And, you know, there's loads of tests to be done on this, you know, we're just at the very beginning of this, but we have done several tests at this point. And, you know, we started off with kind of a 30% efficacy. And the last trials that we ran at this, with researchers at Case Western saw a 90% reduction in the lead within five days. And so that's, you know, very quick,
Unknown Speaker 32:54
draining, you know, a quick chelation process. But we, you know, we're looking at different ways, as it pertains to different materials, you know, metals, they should be recycled, the the plastics are going to be pretty challenging, there are folks that do kind of want to tie this into recycled building materials. And you know, and I think that that's a possibility, you know, plastics, just a problem. Generally, it's a tough one, the inorganic things like concrete and bricks, those could actually, you know, in a future scenario, the bio cycle as well using a microbial process called microbial induced calcite precipitation, which basically uses bacteria to secrete calcite in the same way that happens in coral reefs. And that calcification creates us cement that binds those materials back together. So it's a very,
Unknown Speaker 33:53
you know, biogenic form of creating a concrete, there's a company called Bio Mason that is doing this with, you know, basically binding sand and different aggregates together using this, this process of calcite precipitation, and they claim carbon storage in their process as well. So I think, you know, that there, there are different ways to attack the different substrates that could be part of this. And I think, for every waste material, there's an organism, it's just, you know, finding that organism and the ones that we're working with now fungi tend to like the cellular lignocellulosic materials and so that's why we prioritize things like Woody materials that are in the built environment of ceiling tiles. And as I mentioned, you know, the the petrochemicals are actually can actually serve as like a nutrient for these organisms. So that includes things like asphalt and bitumen
Unknown Speaker 34:49
that are in the built environment as well. Those can be mixed into this process and converted into safe chemicals at the end of it.
Unknown Speaker 34:57
That I love the
Unknown Speaker 35:00
The Coral Reef analogy that is such a cool process. Yeah, the self healing concrete is super, super cool.
Unknown Speaker 35:09
Well, we have like 10 minutes left, and I want to keep talking forever and I have a million questions. But let's go on to your third third major project, which is super cool. And literally out of this world, the NI a C myco texture off planet Mars project. So, yeah, what what is that about?
Unknown Speaker 35:29
Okay, so yeah, the nyac program is NASA innovative, advanced concepts. And we've been funded by them. We're working with
Unknown Speaker 35:39
astrobiologist Dr. Lynn Rothschild at NASA Ames. And Dr. Jim had at Brown and others to develop ways of actually growing buildings off planet. So NASA and other space, spacefaring organizations have this trade off, that when they go to destination,
Unknown Speaker 36:01
they either have to, you know, be like a turtle and take your home with you, which is gonna buy reliability, but will cost you energy. And it costs a lot of money to take, you know, one pound of material off planet, or you can be like a bird and you can trust in your own ability to build a new habitat when you get to your destination. And so what we've we've recommended is something kind of middle of the road where you would take a preceded package of sorts, that that is basically an inflatable building, that when that building inflates, firstly, with gas, but then has a cavity on the outside that fills with water, that starts to grow organisms, those organisms can be turned into solid materials. Just by this, you know, biogenic process that we've kind of mentioned. Now, we won't have any agricultural or industrial waste on the Moon and Mars, so how are we going to grow that substrate for making the fungi grow, that that will be through, you know, algal generation. And really, the resources you need for that are water, and carbon dioxide and trace amounts of nutrients. And all of those things can be found on Mars, you know, in small amounts, but enough for you know, any industrial process. And so, the concept here is that it's, there's these bio,
Unknown Speaker 37:22
hopefully, you can put some of these images on your, on your website, because it's hard to picture this. But imagine a building that has a bunch of different
Unknown Speaker 37:33
cells on the outside of this like almost like a bubble wrap. And each one of those bubbles and the bubble wrap are bio reactors that then grow algae, and then the algae becomes these colonies. And the colony is then inoculated with fungi. And so you get this composite material that's made of, again, plants and fungi.
Unknown Speaker 37:54
But they have, you know, these incredible bio performative abilities, one, you know, provides the structure. But most of that is actually done by the, the fabrics that go into the inflatable, because you're actually inside of a pressurized vessel. So you're not worried about gravity forces as much, what you're worried about is the expansion of the building. So, you know, there's more tensile materials that are needed for that which the fabrics do fantastically. But the building materials do provide some structure, they do provide some protection from micro meteorites. But what they mostly do is provide insulation with those extreme temperatures that you get on the Moon and Mars. And interestingly, we're looking at this seriously for space radiation protection. And this is a concept called Radio synthesis. Or if you want to look that up or radio tropism that was first discovered after the Chernobyl Fallout when a lot of black fungi started growing prolifically, around and actually inside the reactor there. And researchers took those organisms into the laboratory and found yes, they're growing towards the radiation source, that means they're radio tropic. And in some cases, they actually found that they convert that ionizing radiation into biomass which means it's kind of like photosynthesis, but at a much higher energy level, they can turn gamma rays and X rays. Those types of you know radiation sources that you find outside of the Earth's atmosphere outside of the Earth's magnetic sphere, they can convert that into their own biomass so we can actually leverage this radiation which right now is the the biggest liability for NASA into a resource for for making materials and we can use that material that we make as a shield against the that that liability of the space radiation, and the radiation is really the main reason why we you know, can't, you know, colonize the Moon and Mars right now. It's just not safe enough for our
Unknown Speaker 40:00
space explorers to stay there long term longest than anybody's been on the moon is I think 74 hours. And they just very, very nearly missed a, a solar event that would have been potentially deadly for them when after they left after they left the moon. So here again fungi is has found a way to actually take something that is toxic for us and convert it into a positive. And so that that's the reason that you know, the myco texture off planet is so advantageous. First we save a lot of money, trillions, potentially trillions of dollars and transport by growing things off planet. But then secondly, to have these biogenic materials that can actually, you know, protect us from space radiation. It actually enables the missions that we're we're looking we're planning right now that we don't have the solutions. I'm sure you've heard of a Katrina data trova the researcher Yeah, sounds great. We had her on years ago. And it was such an amazing conversation about melanized fungi and their protective ability against radiation and the potential and space to do that, like both on research stations and elsewhere. But yeah, she's super brilliant. If people don't know her work, definitely look it up. It's really interesting. And I was I was wondering about bringing so much substrate to space. And I was I was reading a little article with
Unknown Speaker 41:34
is that Lynn Rothschild? Yes, she's the primary investigator on this on this project. I let I read an article that she wrote about a nutrient hydrogel scaffolding as a substrate and I've heard of aerogel I haven't heard of hydrogel is that.
Unknown Speaker 41:53
It's like aerogel, but more water and air. Yeah, so the hydrogels are actually, you know, way more common than than the aerogel. So what the way you get an aerogel is you create a hydrogel. And then it goes through this process of extracting the water from it. And that's kind of the in depth part of it era gels are fantastic insulators. And so this is one of the things we're looking at more specifically for the moon, where we can get carbon dioxide to grow the albeau substrates. So the hydrogel is useful because we can put very minut sources of nutrients that mix with lots and lots of water to create a material. So hydrogels are sometimes in the neighborhood of, you know, 99% water or more. And the best way to describe a hydrogel is like jello. And you think of something that's in between a liquid and a solid, it keeps its shape, but it has kind of that liquid consistency to it that it moves like moves really well. And so imagine taking jello, which has this, you know, pretty rigid matrix of the structure of that, that's filled with 99% water and imagine being able to suck the water out of that without taking out the shape of the gel and that's how you make a hydrogel and so common ways of doing that is to freeze drying it if you know you're ever had astronaut ice cream that's kind of an example they're very lightweight version of the same material that we're all the waters just been extracted. But yeah, the really intense
Unknown Speaker 43:35
aero gels are fantastic because they have so much of this empty space or so much of these air pockets and that they're fantastic insulators. And so one of the concepts we're looking at is being able to have the fungi grow in this hydrogel, which is again this nutrient rich, you know, gelatin like scaffolding, and then being able to pull all the water out of that enabling less to use that water again and then create this really fantastic insulation material that still has these
Unknown Speaker 44:10
you know bits of melanin with within it. So you know, I didn't mention that in the radiosynthesis part, but if you've read data Kota COVID work. I think her and one of our colleagues Arturo Cassell, Deville have written the most profound
Unknown Speaker 44:27
concept and they're pointing towards melanin is the biochemical that actually creates this process and so by actually growing or you know, imagined brewing melanin in this process and having it inside of this, this insulative scaffolding you keep that radiation protection material locked away in this this very lightweight, insulating material. That's pretty exciting. Actually. That's awesome. Unfortunately, we're running out of
Unknown Speaker 45:00
Time. But all I wish I could stay on for another hour and ask a million questions. But
Unknown Speaker 45:07
where where do you see yourself in five to 10 years? Oh, boy,
Unknown Speaker 45:12
doing more more of the same, I think, you know, we want to continue working in biomaterials pushing out this concept of myco texture, and developing different ways of leveraging the architecture process to, you know, capture greenhouse gases and regenerate land. And so, I'd like to make architecture a force for
Unknown Speaker 45:35
force for regeneration rather than
Unknown Speaker 45:38
the depletion of environment.
Unknown Speaker 45:42
And where can people continue following your work? Okay, so for myco, hab, go to myco hub.com, or look for us on LinkedIn.
Unknown Speaker 45:53
For Red House, you can go to Red House architecture.org, or look for us on Instagram, Red House, studio architecture.
Unknown Speaker 46:04
Sweet. Well, thank you for coming on. I'm super excited. And all the different projects from Namibia to Ohio to the Moon and Mars and beyond. Hopefully, yeah. And yeah, that that's super exciting. So many really cool technologies. And I'm excited to continue, continue following your work and
Unknown Speaker 46:26
hopefully see when you walk inside one of your myco houses one day, that'd be really cool. So yes, in Namibia? Yeah, yeah, that'd be awesome. i It's on my bucket list. I'll definitely go there one day. And thank you. Thank you everyone for tuning in and tuning in for another episode of the mushroom revival podcast. If you liked the show, and you want to support we don't have a Patreon or any way that you can donate directly but we do have a functional mushroom company mushroom revival. So check it out at mushroom revival.com We have a whole line of organic functional mushroom supplements, from powders to tinctures to capsules and gummies we have also my newest book on there as well. The Little Book of mushrooms you can also find it pretty much any bookstore around the country in the US. And we also have just a bunch of free ebooks on there free blogs from recipes to microdosing guides to ecology to mushrooms and pretty much everything fungal including all of our podcasts and shownotes and things like that where you can dive deeper into the episodes and and also just leaving a review goes a long way and telling people why you love mushrooms and spreading the word about something that you learned in this episode or just a fun fact about mushroom just spread the word about fungi and mushrooms and getting getting people pumped about nature and mushrooms and and more people excited about all the cool stuff in the micro world. So with that much love and maybe spores be with you
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