I'm heartened by the interest in better packaging and it seems like it's having a moment. Last week Cruz Foam[0] (probably a direct competitor) had an announcement that it had some celebrity investors[1]. It's probably not a popular opinion but I think adding more regulations or incentives (tax breaks) to discourage the use of non-biodegradable packaging, especially in foods, is long overdue.
Home insulation has a longer useful life than most packaging, but you're right that it still usually ends up in a landfill. However the current incentives for home insulation are very different - usually to reduce home heating/cooling costs and reduced energy consumption is usually an environmentally sound policy. Should there be further incentives to encourage insulation alternatives which have a more eco-friendly end of life? Absolutely. And that is likely a harder problem given the productive lifetime of an average home, but definitely a worthy place to also put further incentives.
I think one of the solutions may be based on hemp, currently known as hempcrete or hemp concrete - essentially a mix of hemp hurd (the woody essence of the hemp plant), hydraulic lime, and water.
You mix it up and then all you need is just the wooden frame (if you're building load bearing walls), then you wrap it in hempcrete (floors, walls & roof), apply some mud plaster and you're done. No need for 6-10 layers full of plastics & glues.
Thanks to use of lime instead of cement the building even captures CO2, as the walls literally turn into stone over time.
Some hemp buildings are 200+ years old, in some cave in india they've even found 1500 y.o. hempcrete, and you can compost whole building at EOL.
Some other benefits: non-toxic, no off-gassing, no solvents, mold resistance, high vapor permeability, humidity control, durable, sustainable, carbon sequestration, fire and pest resistance, passive self regulation of temperature and humidity, great insulator
Can hempcrete be made from Mars or Moon aggregate instead of lime, and 4d printed?
FWIU, lime requires coral for production? Is lime sustainable?
Alternative solutions for: structural wood frame in a hempcrete structure: stacking hempcrete blocks on structural forms that are stronger and more insulting than structural concrete; green concrete, a carbon and thermal gradient sink; and Hempwood, which is apparently stronger than spec lumber of the same dimensions as well.
most lime comes from limestone, extracted by quarries/mines- although sometimes it is sourced from coral
the process of producing lime can involve a number of not-very-sustainable steps, hopefully which can be substituted for more environmentally responsible alternatives
Hempcrete is great for many things, but it produces very thick walls -- like a foot or so.
And they're pretty solid, so snaking a power or network line through the walls after the construction is done -- that's not really very feasible.
And it takes a long time for the hempcrete "bricks" to dry. Although once dried, they are sprayed with a mixture that makes them pretty waterproof, IIRC.
If you can design around the very thick walls, then I think it's wonderful. But you've got to make some changes to your design and assembly process to accommodate the building material in question.
I think Matt Risinger has some nice videos about hempcrete on his "Build Show" channel on YouTube.
How thick the external wall is depends on your insulation requirements - for residential building a foot is not much, not in central/northern europe, because you don't need additional insulating layer, as is the case with other, more traditional building materials. If you build with traditional bricks here, 20cm+ wall then needs 16+cm of styrofoam to have good insulating properties, so 30cm of hempcrete is a plus. I've got a hundred y.o. house, with 45cm brick walls ... and would need to add 16-20 cm of styrofoam to make it an energy efficient.
> And they're pretty solid, so snaking a power or network line through the walls after the construction is done -- that's not really very feasible.
> And it takes a long time for the hempcrete "bricks" to dry.
Yes, that's true. It may take weeks/months, depending on the weather conditions. But ... all "wet" building techniques require some time for drying, so in my country it's non-issue.
> Although once dried, they are sprayed with a mixture that makes them pretty waterproof, IIRC.
If I remember correctly, I've seen some video, where hempcrete building stood directly on the beachfront, with no special treatment, and it withstood the elements admirably.
I agree that a great deal depends on your local area and what the normal construction methods are, and that's radically different between the US and some parts of Europe.
When my wife and I lived in Brussels for almost eight years in a townhouse that was built just after the turn of the 20th century (1910?), one thing we noted was the extremely thick walls. That kind of construction made sense at that time in that location. Modern construction methods in that same area would be thinner, but probably not like what we would typically see here in the US.
Many people in the US don't realize how far north a lot of Europe is. For example, Brussels is on about the same latitude as Toronto and Seattle. And Belgium is not part of what I would consider Northern Europe.
So, hempcrete construction in Europe might be a lot closer to the type of wall thickness you would normally see over there. And the fact that this is a solid construction material versus the hollow "balloon stick framing" technique we see for most home construction in the US -- that might be less of a problem for you.
I personally would like to see a lot more PassivHaus class building here in the US, and a lot more hempcrete in general. But both of those things are going to require a huge shift in the mindset of most builders here in the US.
In the South, yes -- air conditioners are definitely the biggest cost we have for electricity.
I do feel that hempcrete would be a good building choice for a lot of places in the US, based on insulation capacity and relatively low cost of materials.
But the cost of labor to build with it would be higher, due to lack of familiarity with the materials, and it would take longer to build with -- especially compared to prefab or other higher speed building methods. And then there's the increased cost in labor to do the interior fittings.
I am a fan of hempcrete. But it will take significant adjustments to the building process here in the US.
A foot (~30cm) isn't too much for exterior walls, right? A brick wall with more traditional insulation would be about that thick, maybe more with concrete. Running cables is also a challenge with bricks or concrete, hopefully people building/renovating today will have enough sense to build in conduits.
Look at old thatched roof buildings from the 1600s in the UK. That's the kind of wall thickness you're looking at here.
Modern "stick framing" construction is much thinner. Interior walls are four to five inches thick, depending on the actual dimensions of your 2x4 "sticks" and the drywall on either side of that. Exterior walls tend to be a bit thicker, depending on what kind of exterior surface you've chosen to put on the face.
If you want to build to PassivHaus standards with modern construction, then Matt shows examples of that in his video series, and yes the walls are thicker than we would normally see. But still not as thick as you'd get with hempcrete.
I'm not saying hempcrete is bad, I'm just saying that there is a factor there you have to take into consideration when you're looking at doing hempcrete construction for your walls.
The problem with running cables and pipes through hempcrete is that it is a solid material throughout. In modern "stick frame" construction, there is typically no interior insulation and nothing between those two sheets of drywall, other than the 2x4 sticks that are 16 inches on center. So, with all that empty space in the walls, it's much easier to run cables and pipes.
Again, not a deal breaker. But it is something you have to account for. And your current architects and construction crew will have to think and work harder now, in order to make life more livable for future architects and construction crews -- and future owners.
Are walls generally 15 cm thick in the UK? Here in Belgium, which is certainly not less crowded than the UK, my exterior walls are 30 cm thick. 40 cm for the back wall that was insulated further recently. That's for a town house in a city center.
Not about hempcrete specifically, but I can see how you could potentially make a material like this. All these materials used in construction we can assume have an environment with a range of variables they operate in. If this material will never be exposed to high temperatures for example while in a typical operating environment... then maybe you can design the material to be able to biodegrade when heat is applied?
Just think about how even typical composting works where the point is to keep temperatures of the compost pile going in order to aid the process of breaking the material down in an acceptable timeframe.
As it turns out, hempcrete is a great thermal insulator. Less heat flows through it than through other insulators, e.g. wool or cotton. In winter, the temperature of the outer walls of hemp houses can be around 5C lower than in the houses (heated the same way) with standard insulation. This means that less heat leaves the interior of the building. Indeed, with comparable heating intensity, houses insulated with hemp-lime material maintain an average temperature higher by 2C.
Hempcrete is waterproof. It is highly versatile and features desirable structural and moisture-handling properties. Depending on the mix variables, hempcrete makes an ideal choice for insulation, flooring, drywall, and roofing. Hempcrete is also fireproof and rot-proof.
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Unlike Portland cement that needs water to hydrate, hempcrete takes on moisture when it exists and releases it when the conditions allow. Research indicates that hempcrete blocks fabricated and stored in different weather conditions – without any coating – for a few months showed water vapor pressure between 1000 Pa for the drier block and 1600 Pa for the moister one.
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Besides, hempcrete cannot be overwhelmed when it comes to adsorbing of moisture thanks to the vast storage capacity with a sustained elevated humidity of 93 percent. Therefore, high levels of moisture don’t propagate deeply into the hempcrete.
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The lime coating in each hemp block creates a surface that resists the development of mold, even when the conditions cause decay. The resilience to tackle humidity and liquid moisture makes it a desirable choice and a unique insulation material in hot and cold climates.
There's a company doing one based on plasma treated sheep's wool that looks good (if a little pricey).
Their pitch is that unlike other sheep wool based insulation theirs doesn't have issues with insects moving in, I guess the high heat means it's not edible and absorb water any more.
EDIT: Isolena in Austria is the company.
They seem to be one of the only ones whose insulation is purely wool and doesn't have a bunch of recycled plastic in it as well.
There is a company called woolcool in the uk that produces wool sheets to replace styrofoam. The sheets are encased in thin perforated plastic.
As as insulator it’s great, but it does get wet and it’s expensive.
There are companies using it to deliver temp sensitive goods but if you do you have to get your customers to send it back to you to mitigate cost. No one talks about this and finding out the % of packaging returns is information no one volunteers. So you have to get them to return a box full and they also have to hang it over a chair or something to dry it out.
Strip it out of the plastic and a dog or cat will go nuts rolling in it!
WRT house insulation
What happens if it gets wet. Moisture is mentioned in the article briefly but not really addressed properly.
The mushroom product doesn’t have any info on thermal insulation properties. Which is the key market. As someone else mentioned, it’s vague
I think we need a new term to distinguish "Compostable in an industrial composting facility" vs. "Toss this in the average at-home compost bin".
It's hard to tell with any given product, and most manufacturers in the former category are more than happy to coyly suggest the latter. Not saying anything about this particular product, but it's a thing I've been noticing more.
How long does it take to grow one unit? How much space does that unit take up during growth? How stable is the product before use?
Very cool stuff, my take-away from reading about earlier fungi-base packaging is that it is hard to scale in a cost effective way. I've grown oyster mushroom "leather" which was fun, but took about 6 weeks for a 3" diameter.
Once i had an idea: instead of styrofoam or packing peanuts just use pop corn or puff rice. Thermal insulation, shock absorbent and biodegradable! Not sure about flame resistant.
Also reusable. Make a mash, add some amylase and yeast and you can distill biofuel. Win-win.
EDIT: (fungal aspect) seed it with the right spores for container shipping and you get some free penicillin upon delivery!
It seems like it would be impossible to prevent bugs and rodents from getting into packages in facilities that process packages if there was this much free food available.
This is the main issue with things like popcorn and other foodstuffs: Insects and other pests truly love it. Suddenly, you have an insect problem in places that don't have food.
Perhaps it might be feasible were the goods properly sealed? I feel like it would require every step between production to shipment which would require clean environments- that might not be necessarily cost effective, but it is definitely an interesting idea. I would certainly prefer that all packaging be substituted for nontoxic sustainable and compostable materials- it seems doable, additional steps notwithstanding.
Indeed - the packing peanuts use case and styrofoam use case are very different! Former is already solved by starch (dunno why polymer peanuts still exist, maybe we should ban them), latter seems a great deal harder, that's the claim made in OP's link.
The site is really vague. I'd be interested to know what kind of fungus is being used and how economical they are to grow.
e.g. The site claims that production uses "98% lest energy than expanded polystyrene" and is produced from waste. Does this include the cost of growing the fungus? The language is ambiguous.
Mushrooms are one of the less energy and water intensive edible crops that can be grown. If you wanted to make an environmentally friendly bio-material, fungus is a great choice versus corn or other vegetables.
However, transporting waste to fungus farms, sorting the waste, growing the fungus, etc. are not costs that should be neglected when trying to compare the environmental impact of this material to styrofoam and other styrofoam alternatives.
> Aerogels are produced by extracting the liquid component of a gel through supercritical drying or freeze-drying. This allows the liquid to be slowly dried off without causing the solid matrix in the gel to collapse from capillary action, as would happen with conventional evaporation. The first aerogels were produced from silica gels. Kistler's later work involved aerogels based on alumina, chromia and tin dioxide. Carbon aerogels were first developed in the late 1980s.[12]
Can aerogels be made with {formed,?} fungi-based production processes?
Aerogels tend to be fairly brittle, but more recent innovations make them probably work.
Fundamentally they are defined when you remove a solvent from a gel supercritically. High temperatures or pressures. Not very friendly for organics, but probably could work with a polymer.
Of course if you just want a low density polymer with air in it that's just styrofoam. The organic part is the interesting bit, and organic stuff usually has better strength due to multi-dimensional patterning whereas an aerogel would tend to have a single structure throughout.
In this domain it's important to remember that organic means carbon-containing, the word you're looking for is biological or biochemical. Polystyrene is an organic compound.
Is it a carbon sink organic compound? Does it offgas VOCs?
HS chem was years ago. Does jsmol/pymol work in Jupiter notebooks? That probably doesn't at all model heat or other QFT or QG fields.
Though this one probably doesn't require an understanding of how quantum chemistry is actually occurring (Q12 STEM), I found this for protyping, which "operates on abstract data structures allowing the formulation, combination, automatic differentiation and optimization of generalized objectives. Tequila can execute the underlying quantum expectation values on state of the art simulators as well as on real quantum devices."
https://github.com/tequilahub/tequila#quantum-backends
If the chemicals used to make an aerogel are carbon sinks, the aerogel will be as well unless the energy use is higher than the sunk carbon.
If it's not biological, it's usually not a carbon sink. There are exceptions.
And as for outgassing, in my experience any polymer that you do gas sampling over in a closed container will be show some offgassing of something. It's just the nature of solids to release vapor, if there is zero in the gas phase then there's a lot of entropic force to drive there to be at least one in the gas phase. Like, a huge entropic driving force. Everything outgasses.
Whether there's a lot of outgassing depends on the chemicals that are broken down and the volatility and the temperature, I think this will almost always be low but measurable for long chain polymers, and modest for short chain and low density polymers (think how foam insulation smells when it gets heated in the sun if you've ever seen it). What is outgassed is definitely more important, so it really just is super case by case to do an actual safety analysis to compare them, and it would depend on the use conditions (temperature, sunlight, etc).
I don't know anything about jsmol or pymol, I don't think a software suite is necessary here. These processes are pretty basic and you can just look up relative volatilities and breakdown products for a given case. You definitely don't want to try to simulate the thermal breakdown of a polymer (which you'd define statistically with potentially hundreds of thousands of atoms each) -- especially not quantum mechanically -- into the gas phase. There are a lot of opportunities for much more basic issues than software libraries; like how you model the gas around the solid surface and what the structure of the solid surface is. Does gas move due to outside flow? Does it also carry away heat?
It's a hugely complex thing to actually calculate (and even for a few atoms QM simulations are horrific and easy to mess up) so instead I personally would just rely on the rules of thumb I talked about first and then look up actual data from bulk materials property measurements. I definitely wouldn't touch a simulation when real bulk property measurements are easily available.
Probably by an order of magnitude if you factor in all the externalities. Unfortunately, those externalities probably won't make a difference on the sticker price.
Some countries are making manufacturers/shippers legally responsible for their waste, they can no longer pass on their externalities to others. Doing that can help shift the decisions on packaging.
Styrofoam is biodegradable if you think long term. 500 years is nothing and it's very manageable.
If you genuinely come up with something better and are able to get into the market, that's great... but don't try to sell "compostable" as a feature. I don't want my packaging to potentially come rotten.
It is wonderful but in the past these could not be produced in large quantities enough to be actually used as packaging. It takes long to grow fungi and not all succeed.
In general happy that business are going this way.
It would have to be treated with something like borate to retard the decomposition (AKA composting) process. This is already done to cellulose and wood fiber insulation, but it's not clear if this material could be similarly treated.
It emits no more CO2 than the thing being composted soaked up when growing. So it will emit less than the amount the mushrooms absorbed. This is the cycle of life. This is not a problem.
The problem is when you emit CEO that has been absorbed over hundreds of millions of years and fossilized in oil and gas all within 100 years or so.
If you're doing it right and using it as soil ammendment, a portion remains in the soil, building up the soil humus. In the long run it can be carbon negative.
I could see making something like this from food waste and then just burying it in the ground.
Interesting, but growing fungi requires large amounts of water, yet this resource has been omitted this input from their "impact" diagram. At scale, the "manufacturing" process for this product likely will require an insane amount of fresh, clean water. With potable water already a constrained resource in many areas, how big can a single factory be scaled before running afoul of their local community?
Hobby gourmet mushroom grower here. For gourmet mushrooms you use about 60 percent water. For this purpose it is probably lower. Many products require many times their weight in water; this is not that bad. Mushrooms care more about competing bacteria and fungi than impurities... I imagine pasteurized groundwater or rainwater would be good enough for this. Drying and killing the mycelium could be energy intensive depending on the local climate. Maybe they recapture most of the water during the bake... It would already be sterile.
Does it if you're not fruiting them though? I make 5lb hardwood sawdust bags with about a quart, quart and a half of water, and that's all that is needed for the mycelium to colonize the whole thing. I suppose at scale a liter for a 12"x6"x6" block is perhaps a bit much lot.
Biodegradable so they can keep making it, and you can keep throwing things away and buying more to feed their profits, because it's "environmentally friendly"?
I already have to deal with rotted cardboard insulation, mice-chewed foam and the like when restoring old products; with things like this, it makes me wonder what those of the future will have to face, or indeed whether there will be anything left to preserve. The mentions of "regulatory action" are likewise similarly disturbing. Perhaps historians will call it the eco-plague.
The name also sounds more like an antibiotic than a packaging material.
fwiw petrochemicals are abundant in single-use packaging which is thrown away, they take decades/centuries to break down and recently microplastics have become a source of concern. I think many people have acknowledged the excess waste issue and want to address it by providing alternatives.
Meanwhile a compostable material such as fungi can be broken down and reintroduced into the environment in a minimally destructibe way. The same cannot be said of plastics. Also fungi make good fertilizer as well.
Very cool. I'm convinced that as innovators start taking climate change more seriously, we're going to see incredible new products and processes. I'm sure it won't be enough to quell the death cult hysteria, but will make a huge impact in course correction.
[0] - https://www.cruzfoam.com [1] - https://www.cruzfoam.com/post/meet-our-new-investors-advisor...