The new age of recycling and packaging materials you can grow with fungi

Infinite economic growth is at odds with our finite planet, and this obsession with endless growth is driving us towards ecological catastrophe.

Infinite economic growth is at odds with our finite planet, and this obsession with endless growth is driving us towards ecological catastrophe. 

Lots of exciting technologies get discussed, but I’ve never heard of a technological method of recycling materials that uses no energy and generates no waste. We live in a world where far less than half of all recyclable materials are actually recycled.

 


When they are recycled, this process takes a large amount of energy, and generally yields lower and lower grade materials. So, that plastic soda bottle you toss into the recycling bin is likely to be part of a park bench rather than another food grade bottle. 

Now, that’s not to say we should give up and stop recycling. It’s still a positive and worthwhile thing to do. But what if we could live in a society where everything—and I mean everything—was recycled using a system that requires no electricity and runs forever?

We need to invent a way to recycle everything, no matter what. Instead of spending millions of dollars developing more energy efficient recycling equipment, we need recycling systems that don’t use any electricity, and don’t even need any machinery whatsoever. 
 

Perfect recycling without any energy or equipment? It sounds impossible, but luckily, we live on a planet where such a system already exists. Some people call it composting, some people call it nutrient cycling; at Ecovative we look at is as “nature’s recycling system”. 

In nature, everything is food for something else. Without burning any oil or coal, the molecules in your banana peel might one day soon be part of a tree. Nature’s recycling system gets us very close to a thermodynamically optimized system.  

Folks are starting to talk about the circular economy. The recycling and upcycling of nutrients in nature in my mind is the gold standard for how we should design our own systems to behave. Either by directly leveraging biotechnology, and making complex products that are compostable, or by mimicking biology in the way we design goods for re-use and re-manufacture.

we see all this great technology coming to the fore, you sometimes wonder why we dont see it in everyday life yet , is there resistance to take-up of this? maybe financial return has something to do with it

http://www.smartplanet.com/blog/pure-genius/ecovative-the-new-plastic-is-made-from-mushrooms/5717