Fungus, sometimes amazing, mushrooms are delicious, yeast makes bread and booze. Sometimes not so amazing, mold in your house or a naughty little yeast infection if you’ve been getting it on too vigorously. But there’s so much more to fungi than you would ever imagine.
Here’s just a list of a few things that we can make and do with these wonderful little bastards;
Leather
Whether you’re full-on into the leather-daddy vibe, or just like the look of a leather jacket. 100% vegan leathers are being produced using the type of fungi that lives in dead trees and connects mushrooms.
Foam
Fungi can be used as a binder to create environmentally friendly, carbon-neutral foams, which otherwise would be made from plastics. These fungi are added to agricultural bi-products, producing foams that are biodegradable and which can be used in insulation, flooring, and paneling.
Paper
Chitin, a fiber that is found inside several fungi, as well as the shells of crabs, has a similar structure to that of wood fiber. This means that the Chitin can be processed in a similar way to that of wood, creating sheets of mushroom paper.
Water purification
Now things are getting crazy. Chitosan, which is produced when Chitin is exposed to an acid or alkali, has excellent properties in trapping heavy metals such as lead. When this is added to a filament network (which also can be produced from mushrooms), this has the potential to produce a biodegradable membrane with water purification properties.
Medicine
How about slapping some fungus on your wounds? Some fungi have been found to have active healing properties when turned into a dressing. It’s been known for a long time that certain fungi have antibacterial properties, the world’s first antibiotic penicillin is made from a fungus. Whilst these fungal dressings are not currently on the market, they have been proven to have antibacterial properties, stop bleeding and support cell growth in the affected area.
Click here to get more down and dirty with our fungal friends.
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