Mycelium Packaging Is Here and These Companies Are Proving It Works

Mycelium Packaging Is Moving Out of the Lab and Into the Supply Chain

More than 400 million tonnes of plastic are produced globally each year. Less than 10 percent of it gets recycled. The packaging industry has known for decades that this is unsustainable, and the alternatives it has produced so far, paper, cardboard, bioplastics, have largely shuffled the problem around rather than solving it. Mycelium is a different category of answer entirely, and a growing number of entrepreneurs are proving it works at commercial scale.

From a workshop in Cork to a facility in the Irish Midlands to a design studio in the Netherlands, the shroom boom in sustainable materials is no longer a niche experiment. It's a supply chain in the making.

What Mycelium Actually Is and Why It Works for Packaging

Before getting into the businesses, it's worth grounding the material itself.

Mycelium is the vegetative body of a fungus: a dense network of thread-like filaments that spreads through soil, wood, and organic matter, breaking down complex materials and redistributing nutrients. If the mushroom is the fruit, mycelium is the tree. It predates forests by hundreds of millions of years and remains one of the most structurally versatile biological systems on Earth.

For materials applications, mycelium's key properties are its binding ability, its capacity to grow into custom shapes, its natural strength relative to its weight, and its complete biodegradability. Feed it an agricultural byproduct, give it a mould to grow in, and it will produce a rigid, durable structure in a matter of days. Heat it to stop growth, and you have a finished product that requires no further chemical treatment and will decompose within months in normal soil conditions.

That combination is what has companies from Dell to IKEA paying attention. Dell began using mycelium packaging to ship servers in 2011. IKEA has committed to phasing out plastic from all consumer packaging by 2028, with mycelium as a primary replacement for styrofoam. The corporate interest is real, and it's creating a commercial opening for smaller producers who have been developing the technology at ground level.

Ecoroots: Cork's Mycelium Packaging Pioneer

Lavanya Bhandari started the way most material innovators do: with prototypes in improvised spaces. In her case, that meant growing early samples under couches and in a bathroom in her sister's London home. Today, her company Ecoroots operates from a 750 square metre facility in Cork's Marina Commercial Park, and the product she's making there is a commercially viable mycelium packaging system built on Irish agricultural waste.

The feedstock is spent grain from Ireland's brewery and distillery sector, which Bhandari estimates generates around 200,000 tonnes of material annually in Ireland alone. That waste stream, which would otherwise require disposal or processing, becomes the growth substrate for mycelium that is shaped into custom packaging containers. The resulting material is water-resistant for up to four weeks, fire-resistant, and biodegrades within three months under normal moisture and microbial exposure. Production generates around 90 percent less CO2 than conventional polystyrene manufacturing.

The aesthetic of mycelium packaging is worth addressing directly, because it comes up in commercial conversations. Bhandari is straightforward about it: natural variation and colour are inherent to a biologically grown material. Businesses and consumers accustomed to the uniform white of moulded polystyrene need to adjust their expectations. That's a market education challenge as much as a technical one.

On cost, mycelium packaging currently sits at a comparable price point to conventional alternatives, but Bhandari's position is that automation and scale will bring costs down while the strength of the material reduces the need for supplementary packaging like bubble wrap and loose fill. The net cost comparison shifts as volume increases.

Her long-term target market is pharmaceutical cold-chain packaging, a major industry in Cork. Pharmaceutical companies are among the heaviest users of cold-chain packaging globally, and the environmental footprint of that sector is substantial. Bhandari's timeline is honest: five to ten years. But the goal is clear.

Ethica Planet: Turning Ireland's Cardboard Mountain Into Something Useful

While Ecoroots feeds mycelium on brewery grain, Brendan Cleary's Offaly-based company Ethica Planet has landed on a different feedstock: cardboard. And Ireland, as Cleary puts it, is swimming in it.

Cleary's entry into mycelium was shaped by circumstances that would have stopped most people. He had been running Ethica Foods, developing fermented oat-based food products, when a fire at the Glenisk facility in 2021 destroyed the operation entirely. Rather than rebuild in the same direction, he pivoted to an idea he had been developing since 2020: using mycelium to process waste material into new packaging.

He launched Ethica Planet with his son Pierce, a botanist, as the first employee. The company now employs four people including a microbiologist and a designer, and it's based in a region of Ireland that has significant policy tailwinds: the EU Just Transition framework, which supports economic diversification in areas dependent on carbon-intensive industries like peat extraction, has supported the company's development.

The process is straightforward in concept and demanding in execution. Cardboard is shredded and used as a growth substrate for mycelium. The mycelium binds the fibres together and grows into new packaging shapes. The resulting material is fully biodegradable and, according to Cleary's early trials, extends the useful life of cardboard fibres significantly beyond what conventional recycling allows. Standard cardboard can be recycled around seven times before the fibres degrade too far. Mycelium processing appears to preserve fibre strength across additional cycles, potentially tripling the effective lifespan of the raw material.

The carbon profile of the process is also notable: Cleary describes it as carbon-negative, meaning the process sequesters more carbon than it releases. Whether that claim holds at full commercial scale is something that will need verification, but the direction is consistent with what mycelium-based processes have demonstrated elsewhere.

Beyond Packaging: Surfboards and Coffins

The same material properties that make mycelium attractive for packaging, strength, lightness, and complete biodegradability, are driving experiments in directions that packaging alone wouldn't suggest.

In south Wales, 25-year-old Steve Davies is working on mycelium surfboards, using horse bedding and straw from his family's farm as the growth substrate and experimenting with natural protective coatings including beeswax, linseed oil, and plant-based resin. Conventional surfboards are made from polyurethane, epoxy resin, and polyester, materials that take centuries to decompose and generate significant waste when boards are damaged or retired. Davies's project is at an early stage, with durability and scalability remaining genuine challenges, but the application is a useful illustration of how broadly mycelium's physical properties can be applied.

The most unexpected application in the market right now is probably the one that's also the most commercially developed. Loop Biotech, founded by Dutch designer Bob Hendrikx, produces a mycelium coffin called the Living Cocoon. Grown in seven days from mycelium feeding on hemp fibre, the pod-like structure takes a direct run at the environmental problems of conventional burial. Traditional coffins frequently incorporate non-biodegradable synthetic linings and are used alongside embalming chemicals like formaldehyde that can persist in soil and leach into groundwater for years.

The Living Cocoon decomposes in around 45 days, and the mycelium continues to actively assist with body decomposition over the following two to three years, including breaking down accumulated toxins like heavy metals and microplastics. The coffins are available for shipping to Ireland. Hendrikx's work has earned him a TED talk and Vice magazine's Human of the Year award for 2020.

Where the Shroom Boom Goes Next

The businesses covered here represent different points on the maturity curve. Ecoroots is in commercial production with a clear pharmaceutical cold-chain ambition. Ethica Planet is in early commercial development with strong policy support and an interesting technical angle on cardboard fibre extension. Loop Biotech has a finished consumer product already available to purchase. Davies's surfboard project is at the R&D stage.

What connects them is the underlying logic: mycelium can be grown on waste streams, shaped into functional forms, and returned to the soil without leaving a residue. That's not a marginal improvement on existing materials. It's a structural shift in how packaging, and eventually a much broader range of products, can be made.

For anyone following the functional mushroom space, the mycomaterials sector is the part of the industry that doesn't get enough coverage. The same biological mechanisms that make fungi so interesting for health applications make them genuinely transformative for materials science. The shroom boom has two tracks, and both are worth watching.

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