On Friday, April 25, the Log Lunch community gathered to hear from mycologist Sue Van Hook. Sue worked at Ecovative Design, a materials company that uses mushrooms technology to create sustainable alternatives to plastics and polystyrene foams, from 2007-2016, and founded the company MycoBuoys, of which she is currently the CEO. Sue has created the world’s first mushroom buoys, using agricultural crop waste and fungal mycelium, in order to offer a biologically compatible alternative to Expanded Polystyrene (EPS) buoys.
“During this time of the Sixth Extinction, we should be listening and learning to these organisms that have been on the planet for 3.5 billion years,” Sue said. “They have so much to teach us because they know how to adapt.”
She has been studying fungi for 50 years, and has witnessed a huge growth of interest and research in the field over that time. We are moving beyond the so-called Plastic Age, she said, into the Age of Mushrooms.
Mushroom composites need a carbon source to grow, so by feeding agricultural waste to strands of fungal mycelium, mushroom materials can be grown. These composites take the shape of the container they are grown in, and they have an extensive list of other material properties, which has exciting implications for all kinds of technologies. They can be moisture resistant or absorbing, fire resistant, sound attenuating, impact absorbing, and very strong—when melted together with hemp, these materials can take on the strength and rigidity of wood. They are also buoyant, due to the hydrophobic proteins on the outside and lots of air space on the inside, which led Sue to develop her mushroom buoys. Untreated hemp and mushroom buoys lasted for 3-5 months in the ocean during trials, and adding sealants has prolonged their lifespan to 5-8 months. Sue grew a kelp buoy in her bathtub which floated for 11 months, and the rope attached to it broke down before the mushroom material.
Sue has developed weather buoys and cylindrical buoys to float oyster cages, and is currently working with 15 different oyster farms who are looking for sustainable alternatives to the plastic components of their gear. She is also working with student researchers at various institutions, including Bowdoin College, to try to germinate eelgrass on flat rafts made from mushroom materials. Eelgrass provides a number of important ecosystem functions in the ocean, and physical disturbances from human activities have threatened their populations.
Ecovative Design, where Sue used to work, has used mushroom materials for projects involving packaging, furniture, acoustical panels, decorative cladding, and construction. Other people have grown structures—including a mushroom tinyhouse–lamps, wedding dresses, surfboards, and burial systems.
Sue, who called herself a “lifelong teacher,” said that her hope is for everyone to know “how life works on this planet,” and fungi are an essential part of this. “There is a lot of buzz about circular economies on economic terms,” she said. “But looking at this, we are taking plants grown in earth, taking fungi grown from earth, and marrying together for a period of time. Then these things go back into the earth and fertilize new plants and fungi, there is no waste. That is the meaning of circular economies to me.”
The Log Lunch chefs prepared a delicious on-theme meal of pea and mushroom risotto, arugula salad, roasted parsnips, pesto focaccia, cucumber scallion chili dip, and pineapple upside down cake for dessert.
BY CHARLOTTE STAUDENMAYER ’25