Usually, when something starts to rot, it gets pitched in the trash. But Joanne Rodriguez wants to turn the concept of rot on its head by growing fungus on trash to turn it into something better.
“We train mushrooms to eat trash and create renewable, bio-based raw materials,” she told TechCrunch.
Rodriguez is the founder and CEO of Mycocycle, one of a fresh crop of startups using fungi, nature’s recyclers, to create plastic-like polymers for a post-fossil fuel economy. Today, nearly all plastics are made from oil and gas, and they are responsible for about 3.4% of all greenhouse gas emissions, according to the OECD.
“We want to be able to compete with the 3Ms and BASFs and Dows of the world,” Rodriguez said.
That’s no small goal. Plastics are seemingly everywhere, from food packaging to building materials. Thanks to that ubiquity, the global plastics…
