How fungi can help create a green construction industry.

Byline: Ian Fletcher

The world of fungi has attracted a lot of interest and seems to be becoming very fashionable of late. A new exhibition at Somerset House in London, for example, is dedicated to "the remarkable mushroom". No surprise: we're being promised that mushrooms may be the key to a sustainable future in fields as diverse as fashion, toxic spill clean ups, mental health and construction. It's in this last field that my own interests lie.

Climate change is the fundamental design problem of our time: buildings are hugely complicit in the crisis. Together, buildings and construction contribute 39% of the world's carbon footprint. Energy used to heat, cool and light buildings accounts for 28% of these emissions: households are the biggest emitter of greenhouse gases since 2015, accounting for a quarter of total UK greenhouse gas emissions in 2017.

The remaining 11% of buildings' carbon emissions consists of those associated with construction and building materials. The UK construction industry, for example, uses around 400 million tonnes of materials each year and approximately 100 million tonnes become waste. Cement alone is responsible for a whopping 8% of global COa emissions. Compare this to the much maligned global aviation industry, which emits 2% of all human-induced CO emissions. Buildings and, by association, the construction industry, are profoundly responsible for climate change.

Cement - the key ingredient of concrete - is responsible for an astonishing 8% of all carbon emissions.

Ricardo Gomez Angel/Unsplash, FAL

There is evidently a real need for the construction industry to reduce the impact of its material and energy use and to take part in the transition towards a more sustainable economy by researching and using alternative materials. This is not an absurd ask: such materials already exist.

Mushroom materials

And yes, one such material happens to be derived from fungi: mycelium composites. This material is created by growing mycelium - the thread-like main body of a fungus - of certain mushroom-producing fungi on agricultural wastes.

Mycelium are mainly composed of a web of filaments called "hyphae", which acts as a natural binder, growing to form huge networks called "mycelia". These grow by digesting nutrients from agricultural waste while bonding to the surface of the waste material, acting as a natural self-assembling glue. The entire process uses biological growth rather than expensive, energy intensive...