Green Business Blooming In Green Island
It's been a busy year since two graduates of Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute won a $750,000 environmental prize for developing a environmentally friendly technique that uses mushroom fungus to make insulation and packaging material.
That prize, awarded in October 2008 by the Dutch lottery system, helped Eban Bayer and Gavin McIntyre launch Ecovative Design, which now occupies a 10,000 square-foot warehouse in Green Island that is beginning to manufacture a product that could reduce the need for petroleum-based material.
"Our company is up to seven people now. We just added another recently," said Bayer, a 24-year-old from South Royalton, Vt., who graduated with McIntrye from RPI in 2007. "We are setting up our manufacturing line now, and hope to be shipping early next year."
The company's products are called Ecocradle, a packaging material, and Greensulate, an insulation. Both are formed by a mixture of mineral-based insulating particles like pearlite, combined with water, flour and spores from the oyster mushroom, known by its Latin name Pleurotus ostreatus.
The flat, white mushroom is prized for its edibility and lack of confusing look-alikes. Long cultivated in Asia, it is now grown around the world for food. Bayer's patented mix is poured into molds. While digesting the starch of the flour, the mushroom spores produce a tightly meshed network of insulating particles and mycelium, which is the vegetative part of a fungus.
About two weeks later, a lightweight panel is ready, with an R-value -- shorthand for insulation effectiveness -- of three, which is similar to that of traditional petrochemical-based insulation.
Bayer said the company has also attracted financial support from the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency and the U.S. Department of Agriculture, which each supplied $80,000; and the National Science Foundation, which kicked in about $150,000.
