Harnessing the power of mushrooms: The mycelium revolution

Well, it's time on the program now for our science segment. And today we're looking at mushrooms and something that's known as the mycelium revolution. We're talking about an underground network of filaments, which support entire ecosystems by recycling nutrients and by connecting plants together. It is already the source of many staples in modern life, like wine, chocolate, penicillin. But today, experts are excited about what else mycelium could be used for. To tell us more, Julia Seger, our science editor, With me now. Julia, look, before we get into what might be ahead, just tell us first of all what mycelium is. Well, when we cook, we all know, of course the emerge part of the mushroom. This is what we cook, but it's actually only the reproductive part of the mushroom. Underground. You have indeed what we call the mycelium, the roots of the mushroom. These are filaments called hyphias, which are going to extend and create huge ecosystems and huge networks, if you will, in the soil of forests. Now it's actually nicknamed Wood Wide Web in reference to the Internet because it's a communication network. So this how trees can actually communicate with each other. So for instance, they can send messages through this mycelium if there's a pathogen attacking the forest, or they can redirect nutrients towards another tree if the tree is in distress. And and what's actually really interesting is that mushrooms aren't part of the animal or the plant Kingdom. They have their own Kingdom all together and without them life on earth would not exist. The reason why is because they live in symbiosis with trees. So they actually decompose all of the organic matter. So dead animals, Deadwood, but also bark, which is actually very difficult to decompose. And they're able to do that. They get all the nutrients out of that, and they made it available to trees. And in return, trees send them sugars from their photosynthesis. So without mushrooms, we wouldn't have trees, we wouldn't be on earth. And you can really understand how crucial they are because they are the architect of the natural world, right, Julia? And thus by discovering some of those virtues, we could actually think about new innovative ways to use them. Absolutely, they're used today for for various applications, but we've really seen different applications linked specifically to sustainable materials. So if you look, for instance, at the fashion industry, it hasn't really taken the sustainable turn yet. So to make, for instance, a pair of sneakers, you still need 5000 to 8000 liters of water. That's without a mentioning put the pollution, the animal suffering to make the leather. So to overcome all of these problems, the start up in the out of France called fungus sapiens has developed a leather 100% made out of mycelium and you can see it here. And actually when you see that the end product, you really can't make the difference with the type of leather that we know in the fashion industry. Now as you know, we're also looking for the next generation of packaging to replace plastic and here too mycelium can come in and can help out. So this, it was made by the French startup Ambilium and it's 100% made out of natural material and it's based out of mycelium as well. Now what's interesting about this type of material is that not only is it solid resistant, but it's also thermally insulating and it's not non flammable. So This is why it's also very much used in the construction industry. And Julia, I understand that there's one particular application that really impressed you. This is something called bio remeditation. It's a technique that's used on living organisms to help clear up environmental pollutants. Exactly. You can use today mycelium to clean up soils, to clean up oil spills. And because, as I told you earlier, they have this capacity to degrade, decompose organic matter, but not only, they can also degrade products that are derived from petroleum. For instance, now in the United States, the company Microcycle uses mushrooms to recycle construction materials, which is a huge problem because landfills are already saturated there. And let's listen in to Johann Rodriguez. She's the CEO of Michael Cycle and she's going to tell us more about this process of how to teach mushrooms to want to eat waste. We blend specialty treatments here using different species of fungi and those go out and get blended with ground materials. If we took carpet, for instance, that gets ground down, it gets blended with our our treatment, it goes into incubation and in a matter of weeks the materials have been detoxified and grown through. And so to give an example, this is carpet material that has been ground down. And this is what it looks like after a couple of weeks. And at the end of that. We stopped the growth. We created completely inert condition and we grind that down to create a new filler that can go in all kinds of products worldwide and eventually could replace the need to extract petroleum to make plastics. So we can really teach mushrooms, teach mycelium to come and eat and degrade all of the waste that we want to get rid of. So it's absolutely incredible. Now, there are many other applications in the health industry, in the agricultural industry as well. I can't go of course, through all of them, but if you want to know more, you can head to the website Micro Stories. They support and list all of the best projects out there in the world. And here you can see that they've mapped the entire ecosystem worldwide. And I really encourage you to enter this fascinating world of fungi, as we call it. All right, bring on the mycelium revolution. Thanks very much indeed. Julia Seger for us there.