Why Mushrooms are Starting to Replace Everything

Imagine a world where the homes we live in, the clothes we wear, and even the sensors in our electronics weren’t manufactured, but grown. Mycelium, the root structure of fungi, is shaking up everything from sustainable construction to meatless bacon. It’s turning agricultural waste into walls, hemp into compostable packaging, and fungal threads into leather that even luxury brands are eyeing. This mushroom material is set to insulate the façade of a 300-unit housing project in California. And now, innovators are swapping out the sensors of robots for the electrical pulses of living mycelium. So, how long until mycelium is just as ubiquitous as wood, metal, and plastic?

I get requests all the time to follow up on exciting breakthroughs I covered in the past. Y’know, a sort of “Where Are They Now?” for renewable technologies. And with new uses for mushroom mycelium sprouting up in my newsfeed, I toured the farm of the company that pioneered it all: Ecovative on Green Island, New York. They walked me through their process for turning mushroom roots into versatile, sustainable materials. But first…

…what even is mycelium?

When we think of mushrooms, we picture Portobello caps, forest fungi, or maybe Smurfette’s house. But these are just the fruiting bodies; the real magic of mushrooms happens underground. Beneath the soil surface, a vast network of mycelium threads acts as both roots and stomach, digesting and absorbing organic matter. These threads, called hyphae, are tubular structures that intertwine to form a lightweight, lattice-resembling foam.¹²

Dig into the forest floor, and you’ll find this white mycelium network weaving through dirt and wood, acting as a natural binder. This ability to “glue” loose materials together is what first fascinated Eben Bayer and Gavin McIntyre, the duo who dreamed up the mass farming and use of mycelium as a self-assembling, sustainable material.¹³

They mixed mycelium with agricultural waste, like corn stover or hemp hurds, put it in a mold, and let nature do its thing. Fueled by plant matter, mycelium grows to fill the mold, forming an all-natural, compostable foam. This happens fast: in just four days, a rigid mycelium structure is ready to be popped out of the mold, then grown for another two days until its surface is coated with a soft, velvety layer of mycelium. Once it’s baked at a low temperature to stop growth, it’s ready for whatever application its creator thought up.⁴

For Bayer and McIntyre, that was Mushroom Packaging, the product that launched Ecovative into the green economy. Their packaging has been used by Dell, Steelcase, and Emma Watson’s gin brand, with much of it manufactured under license in the US, Europe, and even down under.⁵¹⁴ Today, the mycelium-based packaging market is valued at nearly $85 million. And as more companies adopt greener packaging, it’s projected to grow more than 9% annually, reaching over $200 million in 2034.⁶

Ecovative’s innovations didn’t stop at packaging. While touring massive indoor mushroom farms in the Netherlands, where mushroom caps are grown on straw and picked by hand, Bayer got the idea to grow mycelium indoors as giant mushroom slabs.

“I saw rooms like this, these big beds. And I realized that this was like the most automated, scaled mycelium infrastructure on the planet devoted to growing this one very specific mono crop… And I had the vision… what if we could create this biopolymer in our lab at this scale, at a really low cost?”

This is the mycelium technology I went to see for myself. It’s a novel mushroom architecture, grown from a strain of oyster mushroom plucked off a tree in Troy, New York. Forget the mulch: this is pure mycelium… and it’s unlocking a whole new realm of material possibilities. Looks like the world might just be Ecovative’s oyster.

They’re calling it AirMycelium.

“This is 12 days worth of growth… and you can see it, this has a nice tissue texture. So this is like the future of indoor farming.”

That’s Lacey Davidson, who let me pull off a bit of the mycelium with a glove. ⁵

“It’s kind of tacky. That is wild.”

This is low-energy, low-resource farming. Unlike plants, mushrooms don’t need grow lights. In fact, mycelium hates light. It thrives in the dark on damp sawdust and wood chips — upcycling waste into versatile building blocks. Water use is minimized, too:

“You hydrate the wood chips, more water’s released from the digestion of the wood chips. And then while this room’s really misty, we’re mostly just recirculating this humid air.”

That moisture-laden air is blown around the indoor farm to mimic the mist and breeze of a forest.

Once the mycelium reaches a point where it’s fully matured, but not yet sprouting, the giant racks it’s grown on transform into conveyor belts, sliding thick sheets of mycelium right off the ends for automated harvesting.

On just one acre of land, Ecovative’s mycelium farm produces three million square feet of material each year.⁷ That’s nearly 700,000 square meters of mycelium per hectare.

But what’s truly remarkable is AirMycelium’s versatility. It slices two ways to create two totally different products: leather pants and pocket bacon. Let me explain.

Slabs of mycelium can be compressed with rollers and embossed to create an all-natural faux leather with the stretch, drape, and toughness of the real thing.⁵ That’s a huge win for sustainability, because the traditional tanning process for cowhide is both chemical-heavy and water-intensive. Ecovative’s Forager leather, on the other hand…

“It gets to skip, like, the nasty parts, right? Like all the chromes, all the salts, all the depilation, none of that has to happen.”

Mycelium leather is also grown in just nine days and produces half the emissions of conventional leather.⁷ It’s cheaper, too, ringing up at just $0.18-0.28 cents per square meter (about a square yard) compared to $5.81-6.24 for raw cowhide.¹ And unlike vinyl- and polyurethane-based pleathers, Forager leather is biodegradable. It breaks down like real leather instead of hanging around like plastic.

Since I last covered Ecovative’s mycelium-based leather, the company has partnered with Danish footwear brand ECCO. Together, they’re refining the leather-making process to produce custom-grown materials for shoes and accessories.⁸ And in 2025, Ecovative is scaling up in a big way. It’s set to commercialize its leather, with major brands already lining up — Calvin Klein, Tommy Hilfiger, and Veja among them.⁷

Ecovative isn’t the only company advancing mycelium-based textiles, or mycotextiles. MycoWorks, based in California, is turning Reishi mushrooms into luxury leather that’s already found its way into Hermès handbags. GM even explored MycoWorks fabric for several interior parts, including map pockets, of their SOLLEI electric convertible. I guess that makes mycelium the Cadillac of leathers.⁹

If turning mushrooms into leather wasn’t surprising enough, Ecovative also found a way to make bacon out of mycelium. They call it MyBacon, or maybe it should be…myceli-yum? It’s already on the shelves in over 1,400 stores and it’s made from thick slabs of AirMycelium.⁵

“It gets harvested, it gets crushed… and then it goes into a bacon slicer to get sliced.”

If you take strips of AirMycelium, soak them in a brine of sugar, salt, and natural smoke flavor, boil them up, and add a little coconut oil…then you’ve got artificial bacon with a meat-like texture that fries up in a pan.¹⁰

That’s exciting, because about the only two things nutritionists seem to agree on are the benefits of eating more plants and less processed meat.¹¹ It’s also exciting for the planet, as making this bacon uses a lot less land, water, feedstuff and, well, pigs.

“This growth chamber is one acre of land. Of all of ’em. Okay. That can do a million pounds of MyBacon annually on one acre of land.”

That’s a million pounds of bacon made from agricultural waste and water, with minimal energy inputs and compostable waste.¹²

But what all lovers of bacon need to know is that, yes, it passes the sizzle test. And on a BLT or burger… I can say from experience, it tastes fantastic.

I’m not the only one who thinks so. MyBacon is the fastest-growing plant-based meat in the northeast US, selling three times as fast as competitors.⁷ No wonder Ecovative just secured $28 million in funding to triple production capacity and set up an additional farm in Canada.⁷

Later this summer, they’re rolling out a pulled pork. I got to try it on my visit cooked up with barbecue sauce, and it was surprisingly good: tender, smoky, and close enough in texture to the real thing. I almost forgot it was made from mushrooms.

So we’ve got bacon and leather…what about packaging materials? It feels strange to list those together, yet they’re all part of the growing list of uses for mycelium. A start-up called GOB in San Francisco, California, is turning Ecovative’s sponge-y mycelium foam into single-use ear plugs.¹³ In France, Koz is developing surfboards with mycelium cores and bio-based resins.¹⁴ And in the Netherlands, Loop Biotech is growing biodegradable coffins from local mushroom species and upcycled hemp fibers.¹⁵

Mycelium is also a powerful sound dampener, and Mogu, based in Italy, is using it to build sustainable acoustic wall tiles.¹⁶ In the Samorost house — a glamping cabin designed by the Czech Technical University to look like a cluster of parasol mushrooms — mycelium wasn’t just cladding for the interior walls. It served as insulation panels, too. Even the stools were grown from mycelium, which is probably the first time I’ve seen literal toadstools incorporated into interior design.¹⁷

All this architectural experimentation is surprising considering that mycelium isn’t typically considered for weight-bearing applications. But when grown the right way, with the right agricultural waste, mycelium bricks can be surprisingly strong.¹⁸

An initiative called MycoHAB has built a one-bedroom home in Namibia using bricks made with oyster mushroom mycelium and biomass sourced from invasive encroacher bush. The team claims that pressing and baking these bricks makes them stronger than concrete. Their hope is to someday produce these bricks from local materials at a low enough cost to provide fire-retardant housing for communities that need it most.¹⁹²⁰

We don’t have to wait for “someday” to see homes constructed with mycelium, though. In 2025, a 316-unit affordable housing complex called The Phoenix is set to open in West Oakland, CA, featuring exterior cladding made from mycelium panels. These 36-foot-long, or 11-meter, prefabricated panels are grown from Ecovative’s mycelium-and-hemp blend in giant molds, then encased in a fiber-reinforced-polymer shell for durability.²¹²²

The panels will serve as thermal insulation, cutting energy costs by keeping the building cooler in summer and warmer in winter. Mycelium is also naturally fire-resistant and has impressive sound absorption capabilities — perfect for this housing complex built next to a busy freeway. The truffle on top is that the mycelium cladding is also carbon negative.²¹

You might be wondering how smart it is to incorporate mold into a building’s structure, but this is only the root-like mycelium. That’s not the fruiting body, and definitely not the fungus’ spores. And once the mycelium is matured, it’s baked at a low temperature to kill and stabilize it.²³

But what if we didn’t just build with mycelium? What if we let live mycelium do the building? In an idea that’s truly out of this world, NASA is exploring whether living mycelium could be brought to the moon, or even Mars, to grow a habitat. At the NASA Ames Research Center in Mountain View, California, scientists are exploring whether astronauts could one day unfold a lightweight frame seeded with dormant mycelium, then “Just Add Water” from ice deposits and wait for the structure to take shape.

Unsurprisingly, pulling this off won’t be as simple as throwing together some cup noodles. To make this work, they’d need to grow mycelium alongside algae to provide oxygen and food for the fungus.²⁴ And to shield it from cosmic radiation, NASA plans to use a type that produces melanin…basically, mycelium that can tan.²⁵ Soon, they’ll be testing whether mycelium can grow in low orbit, bringing this technology closer to the Moon than ever before.²⁶

Space isn’t the only frontier for living mycelium. Here on Earth, scientists are finding wild new ways to tap into its natural abilities, like turning it into living sensors for robots.

At Cornell University in NY, researchers took advantage of mycelium’s natural aversion to light to create a living sensor for biohybrid robots. They grew king oyster mushroom mycelium around an electrode and flashed it with light, triggering electrical signals within the fungal tissue. An electrical interface in the robot captured those signals and converted them into digital information, prompting the robot to move. The mycelium wasn’t just an on/off switch, either: different intensities of light made the robot speed up, slow down, or even shift direction to move away from the light.²⁷

Mycelium is incredibly sensitive to its environment, detecting not just light, but also chemicals, moisture levels, and even nearby plants.²⁸²⁹ The Cornell team hopes that one day, mycelium-based robots might be used for environmental monitoring. The vision is to let biohybrid robots take cues from the soil to determine just how much fertilizer is truly needed, reducing excess fertilization and therefore chemical runoff.²⁷ We’re talking sustainable agriculture on top of sustainable construction, consumer products and clothing, food and packaging, all from mycelium.

These humble fungal threads are one of the most exciting materials to come along in decades because they’re grown, not manufactured. Mycelium materials have the potential to replace plastics and foams derived from petroleum. And when they’re worn out or out of style, they don’t clog up landfills for hundreds of years or pollute our oceans, and us, with microplastics. Instead, they break down right into the soil, enriching it with nutrients that fuel new plant growth.

This is the essence of a circular economy: products that aren’t just biodegradable, but regenerative. Mycelium is part of a cycle: grown from agricultural waste, assembled at room temperature with minimal energy, and composted back into the earth when it’s done. Nothing wasted, everything renewed.

The best part is that mycelium does all this without sacrificing performance. It makes for sturdy foams, resilient leather, and even pretty convincing carnitas.