这种绝缘体而不是吹风剂，而不是吹风剂。这很自然。它是用农业废物和真菌制作的。你可以将它成长到位。没有涉及碳氢化合物，它几乎没有任何有毒废物。与大多数其他绝缘材料相比，使物品（低于精力低）需要很少的能量。室内空气质量也可能更好。

Wow! If you’re looking for a super green insulation, mushroom insulation could be for you… if you can wait a bit longer.

How mushroom materials science got its start

I first heard about this a while back when I saw a TED Talk by Eben Bayer,蘑菇是新塑料吗？While studying engineering at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute, Bayer and his classmate, Gavin McIntyre, came up with the idea of usingmycelium,white vegetative strands of fungus you find under logs, to grow materials that could replace plastics.

They’ve gotten a lot of great media coverage, and I recently read areally nice article in theNew Yorkerabout them. According to that piece, the two young engineers worked on developing their idea in their senior year at RPI and then took it full time into a business incubator upon graduation. The challenges were numerous, as they experimented with different varieties of mycelium and substrates. But, along with starting a few fires in their lab, they persisted and promoted and had some good help from advisers who saw the potential of their idea.

At first they used grants and the winnings from competitions to finance the company. One of those competitions was the Postcode Lottery Green Challenge, which gives a huge chunk of money (~$700,000) to the business with the best idea for reducing CO2 emissions. They entered in 2008 and won.

蘑菇绝缘豆芽在纽约

They decided that using their materials as a replacement for packaging was the most marketable direction to go, so mushroom insulation got put on hold for a while. They’ve since picked it back up, and their focus has been on building tiny houses and growing the insulation in the assemblies. They’ve got a nice blog about the project, and it’s called — you guessed it —Mushroom Tiny House。你会发现有一个很好的小视频解释how they make insulation from mushrooms。

I recently spoke with Sam Harrington of透析设计该公司始于拜耳和麦金塔尔，并挖掘他们正在使用的地方。首先计划是生长可用于以董事会形式使用的绝缘材料structural insulated panels(SIPs). The mushroom tiny house is basically a grown-in-place SIP.

Harrington said they’re benchmarking their product against extruded polystyrene (XPS). The advantages are that it uses natural materials, doesn’t have the global warming issues associated with the blowing agents in foam insulation, and has much lower embodied energy. The main drawback is the lower R-value. XPS is about 5 per inch, and mushroom insulation ranges from 1.8 to 4 per inch, with the typical material coming in at about 3 per inch. That means that your walls are going to have to be thicker with mushroom insulation.

蘑菇绝缘和室内空气质量

他们的长期计划包括replac使用它e as many environmentally-harmful materials as possible: plastic foam, acoustical tiles, medium density fiberboard (MDF), particle board, adhesive, and engineered wood. One advantage of their materials is that the mycelium is their adhesive, so they don’t have to use the stuff with nasty volatile organic compounds (VOCs). That means better indoor air quality.

But wait, I hear you asking, what about the IAQ problems of having fungus and spores and who knows what from the oat hulls and wheat chaff substrate? Ah, but there are no spores. They’re using mycelium only. And although they call it mushroom insulation, you’ll see no mushrooms sprouting from the walls. The substrates used as the filler material that the mycelium feeds on and weaves together are sterilized to prevent other organisms from growing. Then, once the mushroom insulation has finished growing, they hit it with steam to stop the growth.

Get ready for mushroom insulation

None of the mushroom insulation products is ready for market yet. If you’re an early adopter, Ecovative Design istaking pre-orders。（根据他们的博客，费用为每杆脚部约0.66美元。）为了获得蘑菇板隔热，啜饮或正在进行的其他材料的货物，您需要等一下。

Whentheir building productsenter the market, I hope they can scale it up so that the cost is competitive with the other materials out there. It’s also going to be important for them to do enough R&D to reduce the number and severity of problems that new products so often have.

Yeah, it’s still fairly early in the development of mushroom insulation, but I’m excited to see this material getting ready to enter the building products market. When it does, it may well be the greenest insulation available.

Allison Bailesof Decatur, Georgia, is a speaker, writer, energy consultant, RESNET-certified trainer, and the author of the能源先锋博客。You can follow him on Twitter at@EnergyVanguard。