Fungi Might Offer Path to Green Styrofoam, Cleaner Shores

“What we started doing is looking for a good candidate of fungi that can grow in Alaska fast enough, and is temperature resistant, and can create a really nice, strong foam that has properties similar to Styrofoam—and do it in a way that the material can be composted,” he explains.

Amstislavski and his students tested it by placing mycelium fibers, along with cellulose (shredded wood chips) and water in a blender and, as he describes it, turning it into a cappuccino. Adding a surfactant made it foamy. The mixture was poured into a mold, where its density could be controlled, and incubated for five or six days, becoming stiff as a board. Different surface treatments can be used as well, making it work as a green alternative to Styrofoam for fish boxes or for construction as insulating wall board.

Testing Walls and Fish Boxes

Speaking at a UAF Cooperative Extension Service webinar September 25, Amstislavski said his team was in the Biomaterials Lab just before the event, making slabs for a year-long study at the UAF Cold Climate Housing Research Center to see how the mycelium board performs as an insulator.

Performance testing done in April shows a lot of promise, Amstislavski says. It insulated comparably to Styrofoam, and initial tests showed comparable fire and compression ratings as well, while mycelium performed much better when exposed to moisture.

“It’s not completely waterproof, but it does not absorb water readily,” he says. It tends toward being hydrophobic, pushing water away like GORE-TEX does.

While wall board is being tested in Fairbanks, fish boxes are being tested in Homer, Kodiak, and Kachemak Bay. Replacing Styrofoam in the fishing industry would be a huge step toward combating plastic pollution, Amstislavski says.

Fish markets around the world have “massive” stacks of Styrofoam, Amstislavski says, and there really isn’t a way to sustainably recycle it.

It’s an Alaska problem, too. A survey of plastic debris collected from the uninhabited Gasḵúu or Forrester Island Complex by UAF graduate student Kit Cunningham showed 45 percent of the collected plastic debris was Styrofoam—and the data did not reflect the millions of tiny beads of broken-down Styrofoam that were impossible to collect.

“I hated the polystyrene foam the most. Each big piece literally bleeds little beads that are extremely labor- and time-intensive to pick up. We found numerous bottomless pits of these ‘Styrofoam’ or polystyrene foam beads,” Cunningham wrote in a 2023 blog post about the cleanup effort on oceanconservancy.org.

Plastics in the water and on shore have a clear path to getting into the food chain. Amstislavski says zooplankton eat the plastic, small fish eat the plankton, and larger fish eat the small fish before being caught for human consumption.

Next: Someone to Bring It to Market

The beauty of the mycelium board, Amstislavski says, is that it can be created using essentially waste products—spruce bark beetle-killed trees, for example, or even cardboard. Corn stalks would provide good cellulose fiber. The goal is to create a mycelium board without the use of petroleum and which is completely biodegradable on its own, and to make it cost-effective.

That last part is the trick, he says.

“It will take three things: Skilled people with commitment and drive, funding to set up a plant, and it will need support from the communities and from fishing and building industries because Styrofoam is cheap. But if you think about it, it’s not cheap at all. Fish boxes are $20 a box… Even if it’s a little more expensive, businesses will want to pay for it because it’s renewable, it’s green, and it’s not going to clog up the ocean for a hundred years after it’s been in use,” Amstislavski says. “There is an opportunity to develop it and make it into a sustainable operation. We are doing the legwork to create the technique; there needs to be another effort to make it a viable option.”