GREEN: BUILDING
A COUPLE OF FUNGIS Enjoying a Skype chat with Gavin McIntyre (right) and Alex Carlton (left) of Ecovative.
up on a farm he saw these mushroom roots, known as Mycelium, growing on and binding wood chips together.
Here’s a bit of a rundown on the technology before I get into the nitty gritty and go all high tech on you with the guys from Ecovative - Gavin McIntyre (Co-Founder & Chief Scientist) and Alex Carlton (Research and Product Development). Ecovative is a New York-based biomaterials company best known for its sustainable packaging materials for food, storage, insulation... You name it.
a mushroom (basically mushroom roots for the laymen). When glassed with eco-friendly resins and bamboo fibreglass or something of the sort, the surfboards will decompose, in effect reducing our landfills and marine debris. Ecovative’s mushroom material technology is also being used to provide a platform for growing handplanes and fins.
Spurred on by environmentally conscious surfers, and with a few keen surfers within the company ranks, they decided to have a crack at producing a surfboard blank. They revealed their first ever Mushroom Surfboard prototypes at The Boardroom Show in Costa Mesa, California in October 2013.
GAVIN PICKS UP THE STORY AND FILLS US IN ON HOW THEIR JOURNEY BEGAN.
Ecovative are essentially growing surfboards made of renewable materials, namely agricultural waste from crop production inoculated with Mycelium, which is the vegetative part of
GAVIN: We got started in 2007. Just like you guys at Smorgasboarder actually, we were two guys working out of the basement of an old print shop. We were in our senior year in College and we were looking at alternative materials we might be able to produce that could replace toxic substances that harm our planet. Eben Bayer, the other founder, had the insight of using mushrooms as basically a natural glue. Growing
He brought the idea to me and said, “Hey, we have this natural adhesive, let’s see if we can grow some materials and see how they perform. So we bought some mushroom grow kits off the internet together with some local farm waste (mostly corn stocks) and grew the first samples under our beds in our college dorm rooms. Literally a couple of weeks later, we tested them and found out - based on the strength and the density and how much the product weighed - we had a really good alternative to Styrofoam (EPS). We started protective packaging, and have been selling that now for about 5 years and I guess it was this time last year, Alex and I had been kicking around the idea of doing a surfboard blank. I had a surfboard in my office so I said, “Let’s cut this up and grow some blanks.” Alex did some blend development and that’s when we brought it to Surf Expo and starting meeting some shapers. DAVE: COULD YOU EXPLAIN WHAT YOU MEAN BY BLEND DEVELOPMENT? ALEX: Our material is mostly agricultural waste and the mushroom is a binder. So the large majority of the over-arching properties are derived from the agricultural waste. We played CHRISTMAS 2014 | SMORGASBOARDER
Nov2014_Smorgas_Mushrooms.indd 81
81
31/10/2014 3:17 pm