By Lorrin Windahl.

Did you know that you can now grow your own product? I know, it sounds a bit backyard hippy meets mad inventor yeah? But it’s exactly what Ecovative are offering with their GIY Mushroom Material Kit. You can either place the material in your own tool or simply mould it like plasticine into your desired form and then watch it grow in density. And perhaps the best part is that, at the end of its useful life, you simply break it into smaller bits and place it in your home compost bin.

Ecovative started in 2007 when two students, Eben Bayer and Gavin McIntyre, developed a rigid moulded material using fungus. Since then the business has grown significantly and is now supplying packaging made from their proprietary Mushroom Material to companies such as Dell and Puma.

They also offer their material to those who want to grow and form it themselves. For $10US, you get a Grow It Yourself (GIY) kit which includes a bag of the dehydrated Mushroom Material mix. You just add water, form it and then watch it grow. Well, more specifically, watch it densify (I may have made up this word but it seems appropriate…). Although the material appears to be limited in its ability to achieve sharp detail I think that the potential of the material is only limited by your imagination. So go get growing!

Architect David Benjamin, principal of The Living, used a bag of the dehydrated material to prototype his own bricks. He then went on to design, ‘grow’ and build the Hy-Fi tower, shown above, which was a winning entry in the Young Architect’s Prize (YAP). Photo by Kris Graves.

Danielle Trofe‘s MushLume lighting collection is the result of her exploration with the GIY material. The MushLume Hemi Pendant is shown above.

Images courtesy of Ecovative.