The Strange Attractor
The Strange Attractor
Crafting with Life: Mycelium, Biodesign, and a Regenerative Materials Economy with Amanda Morgan from Fungi Solutions | #16
If you could ask a living material to help fix our mess, what would you grow first – packaging, panels, or leather? We sit down with Amanda from Fungi Solutions to share how mycelium turns waste streams into durable, lightweight, and compostable products that actually work at scale. From early experiments binding fashion off-cuts to refined packaging that replaces polystyrene, we map the practical steps, the surprises, and the mindset shift from manufacturing to collaboration with living systems.
We get specific on biofabrication: substrates, environmental tuning, and the difference between compressive strength and torsion when you’re eyeing the built environment. Amanda walks us through treatments and finishes – waterproofing, laser texturing, surface skins – and why designing for decomposition is a feature, not a flaw. We talk testing before certification, how to manage MOQs as a small team, and the honest limits today: organics are ready now, plastics need pretreatment and more R&D. Along the way, there’s additive manufacturing with mycelium pastes, sculptural interiors people refuse to throw away, and the sensory surprise of a material that feels like cork meets velvet.
Zooming out, we explore the circular economy infrastructure at a systems-level scale. From waste mapping, regional feedstock modelling, and how AI might supercharge biomaterials (automating humidity, predicting contamination, and powering local facilities). We celebrate community labs, open-source cultivation, and non-traditional pathways into STEM, because access fuels innovation. And there’s fresh news: mycelium leather is now available for distribution, with R&D underway to push performance and craft.
Suppose you are one of those wonderful humans who care about sustainable packaging, biomaterials for construction, regenerative manufacturing, or want to see fungi outcompete foam. In that case, this conversation offers an insightful take from someone who is actively pushing forward in this space.
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Hello and welcome to The Strange Attractor, an experimental podcast from Colabs, a transdisciplinary innovation hub and biotechnology co-working lab based in Melbourne, Australia. I'm your co-host, Sam Wise, and alongside my co-founder Andrew Gray, we'll delve deep into the intersection of biology, technology, and society through the lens of complexity and systems thinking. Join us on a journey of discovery as we explore how transdisciplinary innovation informed by life's regenerative patterns and processes could help us catalyze a transition towards a thriving future for people and the planet. And then uh there was also some audio processing issues I had with the mics, which just made it hard to edit, but I've finally done it. I've I've made it work. So yeah, hopefully you enjoyed this conversation with Amanda from Fungi Solutions. Um yeah, I thought it was a really exciting conversation, and it's just so cool to see so many world-leading people doing amazing things in biomaterials and biodesign here in Australia. Um yeah, so I highly recommend checking out Fungi Solutions, supporting them if you can. Uh really cool concept. It's just so great to see people finding ways to replace petrochemical plastics with bio-based alternatives that could actually work at scale. Uh, and this is one of them. So, this is going to be one of the first in a series of, I guess, um uh podcasts where we start to focus more on biomaterials. Um, it's just personally I find them incredibly interesting, and I also think it's a massive lever for systems change, so from petrochemical plastics to toxic chemicals like PFAS and other DWRs, which are essentially making us sterile and slowly killing us and all of the rest of the living world. We kind of need to be transitioning away from that. Use it so exploring ways in which we can do biodesign using green chemistry um based principles and all of these other sorts of things. So, yeah, it's really exciting to see that more of this sort of stuff is popping up, and we really want to take an active role at co-labs in supporting that, whether that's through the co-creation of a regenerative design studio, um, where we might help with prototyping some ideas and then exploring ways to bring them, bring them to life in a commercial context, um, or whether it's helping set up a new community lab similar to BioAquisitive to be able to make space for biodesigners because it's a bit of a different kind of demand from a lab space perspective compared to like your PC2 lab space. So, yeah, if anything like that sounds interesting, definitely get in contact with us because we're looking to co-create and co-design something like that with others. And we would love to hear from you. And I guess we're better together. So let's collaborate, cooperate, and coordinate to make cool things happen here on the biomaterial front in Australia. Anyway, I'll shut up now and I'll let the conversation roll. And I yeah, look forward to hearing what you think. Amanda, thanks so much for coming onto the podcast today. Um, it's been a long time coming. I feel like you've been successfully avoiding coming in for a chat for a while. So I appreciate you letting us um letting us nab you down for a moment to talk about all the awesome things that you do.
SPEAKER_02:Thanks so much for having me.
SPEAKER_00:Yeah, no worries. So just um, I guess as a bit of a context setter um for this. So I thought it could be really interesting to hear from your perspective. I guess, what is biodesign? Like, what is that conceptually? And what is the notion behind designing with living systems? And why is that, I guess, appealing to you?
SPEAKER_02:That's a great question. I think at its core, uh, biodesign is about designing with life, with living organisms, um, and working with natural systems. Um, it's important that we uh view our uh collaborators or the organisms that we work with as an active part of the process, not just something that we manufacture and extract from. Um, that comes with its own kinds of um uh focus and attention to detail in terms of creating um flourishing, thriving, and and nourishing sort of um materials, products, um, but also the the systems that sit around those design ideas as well. So it's really um rethinking things um and looking at how we can um fabricate things with life um as a collaboration.
SPEAKER_00:So on that note of fabricating with life, what is biofabrication? What like how would you explain that to um someone who might not be familiar with the field?
SPEAKER_02:Yeah, I I think we can think about it similar to the ways that we already make things. You need a scaffold um that uh creates your material um or whatever you're trying to produce, but rather than producing this um synthetically, we're asking our uh living organisms to produce this scaffold for us. Um so our job as collaborators there is to provide the right environment, things like the right food source, um, control waste and contamination to um encourage the life forms to produce the materials that we want.
SPEAKER_00:It sounds a lot like the concept of gardening. Yes. Um, which I mean, as a biologist, I see, you know, microbiology and stuff in the lab as kind of like gardening on a micro scale. But it sounds like when you're looking at doing this work with biofabrication, um, and I love that you're using this word collaboration, because yeah, you can't necessarily force a plant to grow. You can't force a fungi to grow, but you can create the enabling conditions.
unknown:Yes.
SPEAKER_00:And it's that mindset shift from like command, control, designing with precision to I guess you kind of have to allow the uncertainty and the messiness of life and knowing that life will find a way, maybe the right way, maybe a better way than you could have even thought before you um decided to collaborate with this living system, which I think is super exciting. So I guess on that note, what inspired you to focus on biomaterials? What was it that you kind of saw and then were like, yep, that to me is super appealing, and I want to pursue that as a career or even just an interest?
SPEAKER_02:Um I was very interested in the idea of recycling from uh a very young age, and I enjoyed the process of reusing things and giving them new life. So I felt like I was always quite attuned to uh looking at the potential um in something and seeing like the value of the resources there. Um, as I sort of got into um my field of study, which was fashion design, um, I began looking for ways to recycle waste textiles. Um textiles is when you shred them to cut a garment, those cut fibers are no longer really usable. Um so a significant portion of waste comes from just the manufacturing process. Um it's about 10 to 15 percent of the total fibre harvest.
SPEAKER_00:So this is the off-cuts, right?
SPEAKER_02:Yeah, the off-cuts. Um, so in my mind, that's a really significant volume of resources that we're currently not tapping into. Um I knew that it would be possible to cultivate fungi on scrap textiles. Um, you know, they'll they'll grow on plant-based waste resources. Um, and I thought that was such an exciting opportunity to bond um those materials into something new. It turns out fungi are really fascinating as a material in a whole um range of different ways. Uh, so they they just really took my interest, and and there's lots of scope for research and development in the biomaterials field, in particular with with fungi, but uh across natural materials as a whole as well.
SPEAKER_00:Yeah, there is there's so much to learn from the way nature designs and makes materials, and I think it's incredibly exciting that we're kind of almost going through a renaissance now where it's like, well, yeah, it already is there from the three and a half billion years or 3.8 billion years of of evolution. We just need to be able to look and to see it uh and find ways to relate with it more effectively. Um so I guess that's really exciting to hear, I guess, your backstory. I I'm super curious. So you were you just said then organic materials and binding them. So it wouldn't work with like a cotton poly blend. Or did you did you do any like re like was it only organic materials that you were fascinated by? Because I imagine like a lot of clothes is poly, right?
SPEAKER_02:Yeah, a lot of clothes are blended fibers these days. There's some really interesting research around fungi and synthetic materials as well. So it's a whole branch of the research into what uh mushrooms can do, but essentially they have incredibly adaptive digestive systems. So you can target and train them on different waste resources. Um, something like a synthetic fiber is going to be a little more challenging for them to try and tackle for nutrients, but they're very tenacious. They'll they'll certainly give it a go.
SPEAKER_00:Right. And I guess so. The premise behind why they're not as good at breaking these non-natural fibers down is because they haven't necessarily come up against them in nature before. So they haven't developed the capacity to break them down. Or I'm I'm super curious because I I know a little bit about fungi. I don't know much. I know that unlike us, they digest on the outside. So they extreme enzymes into um the environment around them and use that to digest and break down things and then kind of grab what they would like.
unknown:Yes.
SPEAKER_00:So, yeah, how how does all of that sort of work?
SPEAKER_02:Yeah, so the the underlying mechanism is that digestive uh enzymes that they're excreting externally, it's breaking apart the hydrocarbon bonds of uh what they're digesting. So that's the mechanism behind which we can remediate toxic materials. They're breaking apart those bonds and um turning them into simpler um forms. Um they do the same thing with um some plastics. Plastics just might need things like pre-treatment to be broken down, like UV treatment, for example, to make it more accessible for them to get into the material and digest it. So it's a um uh plastic decomposition with fungi um is has some promising early research, but is not yet fully out of the speculative stage. Whereas recycling um organic materials, we know that the fungi are going to eat those. So it was a really accessible place to start in terms of uh volume of impact that could be created and recycling. Um, but there's some really interesting opportunities coming along and some fascinating research projects being conducted around the world.
SPEAKER_00:It sounds fascinating. I can imagine or I could see a world where there is um some form of mechanical process or um or even like a just saying, like a light-based process for treatment, which then you can collaborate with fungi where you're saying, hey, let us break it down to make it a little bit more digestible for you, and then they can come in and sort of do that. I can even see maybe like a synthetic biology sort of situation or a almost like a how do you create an ecosystem around this? Like, let's get some bacteria with pet A's and Med A's, let's put that into a slurry, and then the fungi can come along and break down. Like, do you know anyone who's taking that approach with recycling where they go, hang on, it's never going to just be fungi. It's never gonna be just bacteria. It's gonna be a symbiotic colony of multiple different living systems that create different food and waste streams between them. I don't know anyone necessarily doing that, but I guess we're still in the such early stages of figuring out what each individual can do that maybe we haven't thought about how they might work as a collective.
SPEAKER_02:Yeah, it's not quite that sophisticated yet, but it's one of those areas where we could be looking to nature for how problems are already solved to address some of the things that we're struggling with collectively.
SPEAKER_00:Yeah, we and there's no shortage of those problems, that's for sure. I um yeah, I do think that like living systems thinking and bio biodesign and biofabrication might hold many of the solutions to quite a few of the problems that we have, at least in the in the built or the material environment side of things. Um, but even like I mean, a lot of the problems we face collectively are, well, exactly that actually, they're collective coordination failures of humans who don't understand long-term consequences.
SPEAKER_02:Um one thing that always strikes me is there's no such thing as waste in nature. Yeah. What classic biomimicry principle. Why do we have that as part of our systems? Um, we could go back to the drawing board on a few of these things and and redesign some more effective and efficient processes.
SPEAKER_00:So on that night, uh on that note rather, um, designing for decomposition, all of this sort of stuff, is that stuff so you maybe we should. I'm sorry, this is very non-linear. So let's maybe we should twist it back a little bit um before I start asking about that. So you are the one of the co-founders and head of research at Fungi Solutions. Uh, on top of that, you're also a lecturer in sustainable innovation um and fashion at RMIT, which you also studied that course, which you're now coming back to teach, I assume.
SPEAKER_01:That's right.
SPEAKER_00:Yeah, full circle. I like that. Even circular in your teaching methods. Um, so yeah, maybe tell us a little bit about that journey. We kind of got that you were interested in um, I guess, biodesign and you were studying this as part of your research. How can we look at fusing these offcuts together to um create fashion items? I believe you even had a runway, maybe at some point.
SPEAKER_02:I had a small grad collection.
SPEAKER_00:Yeah, that counts. That counts. I like the like the the humble brack or woods. Like we won't take it down for a moment in grad collection, but um, yeah, I remember that. That was super cool. Um, but yeah, like talk talk us through how this idea for fungi solutions came about.
SPEAKER_02:Sure. Um, so the interest, as we chatted about, started as a way to utilize textile waste and textile scraps. Um, fungi are incredible digesters of organic material and also um have this very interesting property of being like natural glue. They fuse things together, they want to be cohesive, they want to join. Um, so it introduced some really interesting material properties. And myceliums had, you know, some time now to sort of um have a lot of people experimenting with it. Um, this would have come in the early days from uh culinary mushroom cultivation at the end of that process when you grow your mushrooms, you're left with the block of roots, which is the mycelium. Um, and this is what we make our biomaterials out of. Um, mycelium left over from that process has traditionally been composted or made into mulch. It's incredibly aerating and it improves water retention and soil health. So it's amazing for that. But it has so much life and potential just in that middle part of the process because it is a uh near-perfect natural replacement for polystyrene and anywhere you'd use molded plastics. So it has these incredible properties of being lightweight, super durable, very strong. Um, it's acoustically and thermally insulating, as well as fire retardant, can be grown on waste and sequesters carbon. So we're we're looking at some really amazing credentials as a material, um, but also a huge amount of scope to work with it and uh explore what it can do. It's it's almost like a brand new clay or something to work with, which comes with its own really interesting ways to mold and form it. So I started working with fungi um in my degree, uh, studying the uh Bachelor of Fashion and Textiles. Um I then sort of did some material development for a few years. Um, and I was doing some like private tailoring tutoring, uh, which is where I met my amazing business partner, uh, Camden Cook. Um, and we decided that the fungal materials had so much potential, and Australia was such a um like a central location with um incredible agriculture and beautiful produce here that we really wanted to do something to celebrate that. We wanted to create um a social enterprise, something that um generated impact like in our communities, solved problems, um, but also just prevented all those amazing resources from going to landfill. Um so from having work worked in the uh sort of biodesign natural materials industry for a little while now, um, I've then sort of come back full circle all the way back to uh the place where I started studying and come in to teach biodesign for the um sustainable innovation um program.
SPEAKER_00:Yeah, it's um it's been fun having the opportunity to show. Um, so you've come in a couple of times with the students for the last two years now, I think it's been. It's been about four different cohorts. And it's always interesting seeing, I guess, how many amazing questions and how curious everyone is about, I guess, this sort of space and what can be done. Um it's uh yeah, it's exciting to see and to to know that there are so many people coming through the ranks that are being exposed to like a lot of them are traditional design, right? But they're still being exposed to this fuzzy, quirky, strange, you know, thing in the corner, which is biodesign. Um and I look forward to seeing it sort of move from, you know, the corner to center stage, which I feel like it's really going to be doing um in the next sort of little bit. I'd I'd love to know um if there's anything new that's been happening in the works for you. So I know every time we talk, there's about 10 different things because there is so much that fungi can do, right? Like I know that you're working on bioremediation to break down cigarette butts using fungi, which I guess goes back to that question I asked about can poly be broken down? Because I assume there's probably a lot of strange like polyesses and stuff like that in cigarette butts and whatnot. On top of that, I know that you make mycelium-based paper as one of your products. You also have the packaging you were referring to. So you you have the polystyrene replacement and the molding for packaging. Like what else? Because I feel like there's probably another product line somewhere that I haven't even mentioned. So many, so many products.
SPEAKER_02:Um, it's a wonderful problem to have fungi so adaptable and um incredibly good at what they do, and it is really nice to see um so many emerging designers um sort of coming into contact with these ideas around biodesign. It's a brand new emerging industry, so there's uh a lot of exciting developments as always. I feel like um Mycelium in its basic form has had some really nice opportunities to be explored in interiors and furniture pieces, um, and we we see a fair bit of packaging with it as well. It they're all really nice applications, and um, there's been some incredibly surprising learnings um from working in those sectors, namely it's uh designed to be a single-use compostable material, but most people choose to keep the mycelium and reuse it for something else because they find it so beautiful, which I I don't know what other pieces of packaging you could possibly say that about. Um so that's been something that's um uh incredibly interesting, but the the the scope for it is truly limitless. Um we're quite interested in its sculptural properties. Um so we're um looking at new uh techniques and and ways to work with it as um craftsmen uh and artisans as well. So it has it leans itself to um like manufacturing for something consistent like packaging, but it can also be an incredibly expressive medium to work with, which is um really fascinating for us to try and um workshop that process. Uh then there's always um mechanical property improvements, so uh you know, increasing the resilience or strength performance, waterproofing um, and and fire properties. Um and then we've got ranges like um mycelium leathers, um, and yeah, just just some uh very interesting projects coming along with a few partners.
SPEAKER_00:Oh, that's exciting to hear. I um I had the I guess the privilege of of getting to be a part of um there was a design studio last year. I can't remember the the name of it with K-5 furniture, I think Guangzhou, and there was a few other people there, and I was one of the judges for it. And just seeing the people coming through, you know, creating the lampshades, which are again as you're saying, like the design and the high design, I see as being a really nice vehicle for getting these things out there. Um, acoustic panelling, really nice modular artworks as well, where you could have like different, almost not Lego, but the equivalent of having something like that. So you could then interlocking. Yeah, interlock and change and shape. The one thing I'd be so fascinated by would would be to know whether or not anyone's been experimenting with additive manufacturing with a mycelial, like like so let's say they're using clay or something else, or um some waste stream products, maybe like a timber or something that has been reclaimed, and then they're also mixing through a mycelium. Like, has anyone done anything like Yeah, yeah.
SPEAKER_02:We we've seen furniture pieces like that that have been 3D printed as a paste and then allowed to grow, for example. Um, yeah, it's really just opened up a whole new style of manufacturing in a lot of different ways. It's like discovering marble for the first time again.
SPEAKER_00:Which says does anyone even use real marble these days? I feel like that must be a dime a dozen trying to find like things like that. I feel like every I mean, I I the reason why I asked that or say that is um we're building a new lab down uh uh in the Furniture Business Park near Monash Uni, and um we're we're getting this nice uh bench top, but it's not marble, it's like an engineered stone low silica, which I believe they just essentially crush dust up and turn it into a thing. So yeah, I mean, I guess I don't know why that's even relevant to anything, but just when you said the marble thing, I'm like, I don't even know if you like that's the thing, right? These these these things that are non-renewable on human timescales, we're running out of those resources, right? Like we can't keep using them the way we used to, which is why these things are fascinating because they can grow in what, like two weeks?
SPEAKER_02:Uh a month. The grow times four days.
SPEAKER_00:That's insane.
unknown:Yeah, yeah.
SPEAKER_02:And mycelium's lighter anyway. So getting you Yeah.
SPEAKER_00:Have you done so? I I've seen, I know that you had mycelium bricks lying around, but do you know anyone who's done any work with like mycelium brick walls and whether or not they can be structural or whether they're purely aesthetic at this stage? Like, how how durable are we talking about these sort of materials? Could they have a use in the built building industry, I guess?
SPEAKER_02:I think the um the current approach is mycelium's incredibly good with compressive strength, but it's um fairly weak with torsion. Yeah. Um, but it's got those incredibly important insulation properties. So if you're looking at mycelium for construction, you want to be pairing it with complementary materials. So you might have your load bearing in a different material, but your insulation properties coming in with the mycelium. So this is where you'd be combining biocomposites. Yes, right, exactly. Or um, you know, engineering in support structures.
SPEAKER_00:Right. So I can imagine a world where there could be a mycelial thermal and acoustic barrier in a wall, and then you have like a uh like a hemp crete brick, and then maybe on the other side you have like a hemp board as well, or maybe like a scoby, like a bacterial cellulose blended up and dried to use as something on the back. I can imagine seeing like a stack like that of like all these biomaterials that could go into making like new walls and things like that that could be fabricated in a pretty short amount of time.
unknown:Yeah.
SPEAKER_02:Add in some kelp and you've nearly got the whole spread of material outcomes you could need.
SPEAKER_00:That's it. We've slowly been collecting um all of the different um folks working on this space so that we can be like, let's just put them all together and see what happens.
SPEAKER_02:And they do look beautiful together. I think they're very complementary, like material groups.
SPEAKER_00:Are there any um design studios working with all of those materials here in Australia?
SPEAKER_02:I'm not aware of anything that's really specializing um in in that area, but I do know that there's a lot of active interests in incorporating these materials. Um it's it's almost like everyone's been just dying to get their hands on them, essentially, and and is really looking forward to figuring out how to include them in their processes.
SPEAKER_00:Yeah, so on that, on that note, I I I 100% agree with what you're saying. But then the there's another part of my brain which uh flicks into like the cynical business mind of being like, well, um, will it be scalable? Uh, how can we ensure that it's a good drop-in? Will it get to the same price point? You know, like all the classic, which you would get asked all the time by anyone, um, sort of asking these sort of things. Like, and I imagine another big one, you know, in addition to just those properties, um, would be like regulatory things, right? Like if something has to be um fire retardant or if it has to meet a certain standard. And and that standard is managed by a group of people that probably also are the industry. And then you're like, well, it's probably not going to get passed based on that, unless you have a lot of money to get it through a different path. Do you know what I mean? I can imagine that there would be potential systemic barriers that are maybe going to be getting in the way of bringing these products to market. I'm sure you've maybe even dealt with these yourself. I would love to know what you might think these barriers would be, say for fungi and maybe other biomaterials, and how you think they could be alleviated, whether that is from like government intervention or support or you know, um something like a collabs trying to offer support or um just uh it doesn't matter, I guess, how. Like I'd be so curious to see what your thoughts are on that.
SPEAKER_02:That's a great question. Um I think that the really the most fundamental step in that process is having your minimum viable product, whatever that is, so you can at least start. Having full certification is um a real like down the really sophisticated end of getting something new to market. You kind of need to be sure that you're on the right track first, uh, which allows you to gain a bit of traction, but that's not to discount how challenging of a phase that is. Um but one thing that's really helpful to have before you have your full certification, which is a significant investment for any business, um, is how do you conduct indication testing early and and like have that accessible so you can make some decisions about whether you go forward or not.
SPEAKER_00:What is indication testing?
SPEAKER_02:So say you want to um understand whether your product is home compostable.
SPEAKER_00:Right. And it might cost you 30k to have 30k to figure out whether or not it's home compostable. Potentially. Couldn't you just home compost it?
SPEAKER_02:This is this is the important part of um the the phase before it's easy to just uh go get certified, for example. Right. Is when you do have to just home comp like you have to try things out physically to give yourself an indication of do you go for the certification? Um, but you have to do that across the board with everything to do with your product. Will people accept it at the price point you want to offer it? Like, does it function? How does it perform? Um, you're gonna have to do all of that before you even think about certification because those questions and answers may change what you have in your hands.
SPEAKER_00:Yeah, I can imagine it's kind of like a like every different part of the problem is dynamic and can change based on other inputs and outputs. So you're dealing with like quite a complex system of trying to get this thing from ideation to actualization. And especially when it's a zero to one, like these a lot of the times these things don't exist or there's no precedence for it. So when you go to test it, they're like, I mean, you can test it against uh brick, yeah, and you're like, well, it's not a brick. Yeah. Uh, you know, we can test it against this, but it's it's it's not it's its own thing, it's the beginning of infinity. You know, we're starting something new here. Um, yeah, I can imagine it would be challenging because you have to make it analogous to current things that people know rather than have it clearly carved out as its own defined area, which I mean, this is what you see this happen with um cultivated meat for a prime example. So we have members here working on cultivated meat. They like, is it agriculture? Is it cell biology? You know, it's deep tech, sure, but like where does this thing fit?
SPEAKER_02:Can you call it meat? But like that's what the end user is like looking for in an experience of something that they want to brown and 100%.
SPEAKER_00:You know, and it kind of is style. Like I mean, it is agriculture. We we're cultivating and growing food, but it's just using a high-tech process. So it's same with the leathers. Exactly.
SPEAKER_02:What counts as a leather, what counts as a hide. But I I think spaces like collabs are so important for that phase where you're just trying to understand what you have in your hands. Um and like sometimes literally impact that it could have on the world. Yeah.
SPEAKER_00:Yeah. What is this? Speaking of which, we um we need to, I still really keen to do a try and do a little collab with you guys, maybe some mycelium paneling or or something fun in the space, or just to showcase some of your stuff. Because it would I think, as you said, it's it's quite striking and beautiful. Um, so we'd love to showcase some stuff in here.
SPEAKER_02:It's such a um incredible talking point. So we do a few exhibitions and event events because fungi just create beautiful installations that um draw people in. Um and yeah, I I think it's really uh lovely to see people like gathering around fungal sculptures and materials. And we often um have people be quite surprised by the textures and the feel of the material, for example. It's nice to have people up close to it.
SPEAKER_00:So it's way more hands-on than like, I don't know, traditional art. You're like, yeah, come and play with it.
SPEAKER_02:We encourage people to like touch the materials because they are so surprised. Um the the texture I'd sort of describe as being somewhere between cork and velvet or like a felt, like it's very soft, but it's got like a it's just a paradox. Yeah.
SPEAKER_00:But I love it. Yeah, I know exactly what you mean, having having touched it and handled it. Um, it's so fascinating. And what I what I love and what I think is potentially an enabling constraint and fascinating about these things is they literally are designed for decomposition, right? So I know Andrew made a fungi brick a while ago um and was displaying it at the Monash Tech School, and then um they came back after the after the the holiday break and um it was hollow. And this collection of ants or or some other organism had gone up there and eaten all the mycelium and just left the the the biome, like the I guess let's say the substrate. Um, and I and just just knowing that that is possible is is both fascinating and beautiful because it means it's ticking the box for all of the right things from nature's perspective.
unknown:Yeah.
SPEAKER_00:But I can see how then someone will be like, well, yeah, I'm not gonna build a wall out of that.
unknown:Yeah.
SPEAKER_00:But I can still see it as being like, well, you can still replace things or you can find coatings and like nature has ways to preserve and to coat and to make things less attractive to organisms. So it's not that it's um, as you said, it's just the beginning and we're starting to figure these things out. And I would be curious to know, like, is there any um you obviously don't have to tell me anything sensitive, but like, have you figured out a treatment thing for your paper or for the fungi that allows it to have different properties? Like, do you use a beeswax? Have you experimented with anything like that to come up with new and novel, I guess, textures and ways of working with it?
SPEAKER_02:Yeah, that's um a lot of what I do within the organization. The fun stuff. The fun stuff. Uh, but yeah, we we have options for waterproofing, we can change the surface texture, we can change the color, um, we can grow sort of interesting sculptural forms out of it. Um we do a bit of uh surface treatments with a laser cutter um or putting textures into the mycelium. Um it picks up all those surface treatments really well. Um, but all those options uh open up new applications for the mycelium. So waterproofing being a significant one for extending the lifespan and um making something like interiors make more sense for it. Um, even in its raw form, though, we're finding the materials um are quite solid and stable for several years. So we're not finding that they're um, you know, disintegrating um super easily. It's more when you introduce those natural elements like um hungry insects or um moisture compost conditions, then you'll have uh the material um breakdown, but it's pretty stable and inert dry.
SPEAKER_00:Where do you think the field of biodesign is going to go in the next decade or so? So, like what what do you see? What are the glimmers of hope? Like, obviously, we've been talking about all this sort of stuff. What do you think needs to happen to help get these things into the mainstream and and make it as uh make this preferable future possible, I guess?
SPEAKER_02:Um I see some of the bottlenecks being solved by having some circular economy systems in place. It's very ad hoc and like individual organizations happening, and there's a little bit of focus on trying to get things linked up. Um, part of the challenge is that we have very dispersed waste systems. No one knows how much of what is going where, um, but a significant portion of it is going to the tip or being burnt. Yeah. Um, and that's just a value opportunity for us there and quite a significant like even if you're just focusing on the financial side, that's a lot of opportunity. Um, but economically and socially, there's a lot there as well. So I am seeing some really interesting impact-based business models backed by these natural material solutions. Um, they're certainly becoming more accessible and available to um smaller organizations. So the MOQs are coming down quite significantly.
SPEAKER_00:MOQs.
SPEAKER_02:So minimum orders, um volumes essentially, are becoming um more accessible. Of waste streams or of of uh natural material like biomaterial solutions for that replace existing materials that are problematic. So something to replace your polystyrene boxes or your bubble wrap.
SPEAKER_00:And they're not going to ask you for five tons of it next week. Exactly. Instead, they're like, let's okay, I understand.
SPEAKER_02:Yep. So that's sort of um becoming more available, um, which I think is really nice and and will have a significant impact. Um, and the materials are becoming quite sophisticated and refined in their application now. So they're moving out of that speculative phase into commercial reality.
SPEAKER_00:I love um, I love that you just called out one of the latest initiatives that we're trying to work on, which is great, um, is which we're looking at collaborating with Materium uh and they're working with Google org as well. About like, well, you know, we could hypothetically use an AI to do industrial ecology at scale, which could link everything together in a platform which is free to use. Like you could you could set this up and and create that value that you're speaking of through allowing people to see the and like see the flows of resources because you've done a systems map which allows you to identify where all the different things are. And then what you can do is you could have a fungi solutions based in the wine region to be able to then capitalize on all of this, you know, spent grape material to then create X. You can have, oh, we've got a kelp farm over here. Let's do a bioprocessing facility here to be able to turn that into um plastic alternatives for packaging and other things. Like once you you can't necessarily I don't know if this is probably someone else's quote, I'm silly, but you're not necessarily going to be able to change a system without knowing what the system might look like or how some of those patterns and processes are flowing. And through observing that, you can then find appropriate leverage points to kind of nudge or intervene with the system to make it more effective. Like, even though they're currently focusing from a reductionist perspective of isolation and segregation, really, when you take a bigger picture view of it, it's all interconnected and interlinked and interrelated. And that's the problem, is that there is a lack of the systemic awareness of the problems. And everyone's just doing what's right for them, full well knowing that it's not what's right for humanity or the planet as a whole, but it makes sense economically in the short term. Um, you know, but it's starting to rethink in this sort of living systems way and being like, no, we need to be trying to take a like a wider circumference of care and a wider circumference of trying to comprehend the whole. Um, and it's just exciting because you said that. And I'm like, that is literally just a grant proposal that we put in to try and collaborate around because that does feel like the low-hanging fruit at the moment is helping people collectively coordinate and come into a pattern of coherence so that we can shift away from this current method of doing that is degenerative and destructive, towards something that might be leaning towards a more regenerative materials economy. So cool. It's exciting to hear that you're thinking the same sort of things are glimmering, which which makes sense. We know we're we're we're swimming in the same river system, um, you know, doing what we're doing, so it makes sense. Um yeah, what are your thoughts on on that?
SPEAKER_02:Or we're really excited by the idea of regenerative manufacturing. So um our processes creating something nourishing at the end. So even our waste product enriches soil and and goes into soil testing programs. So I think there's so many exciting um opportunities when you're you're looking at your organizations this way to um see good things happen out of it.
SPEAKER_00:Yeah, and again, it's bringing that um the lens of like, let's say, biology or um ecology or what have you to it, right? Is this this regenerative enterprise approach where you're giving more than you take, um, where you're trying to look for those ways in which you can collaborate effectively with other entities in the space where you're because there's collaborative advantage and collective intelligence advantages that you can get from that, and like diversity of opinion and thought and diversity of organizations. So, way better than a monoculture, right? A polyculture is going to be way more biodiverse, more innovation from a biological perspective. So, like it's so easy. I mean, I I say it's so easy, but it's maybe that's because I have a biology background and ecology background, and then also study business so I can see how these two can fit together, which is maybe unconventional or I guess what we call business unusual. Um, but I do feel like that that collaboration and that transdisciplinary approach is going to be essential for this ecosystem to, I guess, come to life. And um, yeah, I guess on that note, I would just be super curious from your perspective, how how dependent are you upon collaboration and trying to work with other people in the space to bring your ideas to life?
SPEAKER_02:We're really excited by partnerships because it introduces us to challenges and problems that we won't have been aware of. Um, someone might come to us and say, we've been looking for a solution to this material problem or this packaging piece or um this product for so long, and we haven't found anything that fits. Um, and we think that fungi might be a good outcome. We get to work towards that and make make a solution. Um, so I really enjoy the partnership collaborations where you're solving uh something that's really exciting. Um, and I think when you're an organization at a small scale scale as well, it allows you to test and trial things out. So our facility in Thornbury is very much a pilot facility so that we can do case studies and try new waste sources and do all this important RD that needs to happen with fungi and Australian waste.
SPEAKER_00:But it sounds like as well, like uh you're both an RD and an innovation at the same time. And it's acknowledging that it's not necessarily either or. You can be doing fundamental research as at the same time as doing challenge-led innovation, which it's just it's great to hear you saying that as well, because we we kind of feel very similar in in the way in which you know it's uh challenge challenge-led from industry or these other places is probably going to be a really viable way to create biomaterial solutions when you know there's someone who's a problem holder and you know that you have the potential to be a problem solver, and you know that they might have the resources, whether that's financial, social, knowledge, whatever sort of uh resources you might need to be able to bring that to fruition. Um, I think that is arguably one of the most effective ways for you know deep tech organizations or buyer-led organizations like Fungi Solutions to try and bring ideas to life. Um, and it's also just like a very adaptive way of doing business, which can be horrifying for those who are used to more traditional methods. But um, yeah, no, it's exciting to hear you say that because I think we really resonate with that as being a way in which we try and operate as well. It's like everything's a potential experiment. It's creating safe to fail environments to rapidly iterate and prototype on these things, and that's where the knowledge and the learning comes from. It's no different to evolution where you have like a whole um species, and every different organism is uh in that species is essentially a new invention of that species as a whole, and you're kind of rapidly prototyping and seeing what works, and then you know the best things get passed on. Um, and I feel like it's a similar sort of approach when you're trying to bring this new uh thing to life, I guess you could say.
SPEAKER_02:Yeah, nature's very inspiring and we can learn a lot there.
SPEAKER_00:Yeah, that's for sure. Um speaking of learning a lot, what advice would you give young scientists or I mean, just to be clear, you actually studied fashion, not science.
SPEAKER_02:So maybe that's not even I don't know, I don't know what the right question would be, but like it's my my encouragement would be that you don't need to be a formally trained scientist to uh enjoy learning, um, ask good questions, and uh if you uh have the capacity to be a little creative about your experiment design, you can do a lot without formal training. Um so I um I think it can be an amazing resource to deepen your your understanding in a field. And in fact, I'm going back to do formal training because yeah, I'm gonna start a master's this year.
SPEAKER_00:Awesome.
SPEAKER_02:Um in fungal materials. Um RMIT.
SPEAKER_00:You're kidding. They have a you can do a master's in fungal materials at RMIT.
SPEAKER_02:I'm designing my own project, but yeah.
SPEAKER_00:That's uh that's so boss. Just being like, yeah, I'm gonna make my own. Like I wanna do because that's what I struggled with trying to do like further research was going, I want to do this thing that doesn't exist. How do I I can't just do that?
SPEAKER_02:Why not?
SPEAKER_00:You've just motivated me. That's so exciting.
SPEAKER_02:That that would be my encouragement for people that are excited by STEM is that um you you can learn a lot off your own steam. Um I was self-taught with how to cultivate mushrooms, and it it's important for me to acknowledge the amazing community around mycology that freely publishes resources. I believe in like open source sharing of cultivation experience. So it's because there was that um you know uh open and like fostered community available in mycology, I was able to sort of transfer some skills. Um, but I think followed the the interest first and foremost. And um yeah.
SPEAKER_00:And that was um, there's a fun little loop back here here and there and everywhere, right? So some of the hands-on experience was through bioinquisitive, that's right, the community science lab, and then the fungi group, like I know my community was a part of that as well. So it's interesting how there's all these different loops, and I I'm so glad you said that because I don't know if we've told you about the new civic science hub. I know that you came along to the first like bioq relaunch, but yeah, we are looking at exploring this whole new um, I guess, educational. Like, we're even going to go down the roll, the direction of becoming a registered training organization to be able to offer education in these new and emerging fields of like circularity, biodesign, living systems thinking, ecological design, synthetic biology, all of this stuff that is incredibly meaningful and could potentially help us move the needle, but uh might not necessarily always be accessible until like your PhD, you know, where it's like, well, actually, the skills that you want to do are pretty simple, like it's not hard. It's like cooking or following a pretty simple recipe book. Like it's none of the science is actually hard. It's just uh, and I don't want to that might sound mean or like I'm trying to, you know, uh, I can see how that could be interpreted the wrong way. But uh realistically, if you want to learn a specific skill set for a certain task or you want to learn about these things, you can do that self-taught research and then come into a place and learn, okay, here's how I cultivate mushrooms, or if I was gonna do this, I could do, you know, this pathway and and in like six to 12 weeks be at a like a master's grade level of competency because you've just spent way more time in the lab rather than in the theoretical.
SPEAKER_02:Yeah, I I would never want to see someone that's excited by nature or or biomaterials or anything like that not get involved because they felt like they didn't have the skills. And I think that's why um organizations looking at citizen science um were so amazing, like my community, so that people could have support from people that had um their scientific training and paths along that experience. Um you can contribute to like conservation and um, you know, DNA collection and that sort of thing, all really important projects. Someone's been trained in the scientific method to do all the data collection, but we still need people with hands-on, um, we still need um people uh observing field sites and collecting samples. So there's many different ways to be involved in STEM, uh, which I think is amazing. And I'm very excited to see that more accessible.
SPEAKER_00:Um yeah, and even from the design perspective, right? Like I don't know, I guess maybe because I try and see things from not necessarily a single disciplinary perspective, but to me, like science, design, I mean, science and design are similar sort of things, right? But science being a very narrow subset of design in which you're designing, as you said, protocols and procedures to try and do X based off a certain philosophy. Philosophy underpins design and science, and then design being a certain way of looking at the world and how do we bring um artifacts into reality, whether they're physical or digital artifacts? So I yeah, see it all as interrelated. And but I guess as well from that side of things, I I'd be curious to know what your thoughts are in regards to sharing a sentiment to designers. Is it the same sort of thing? Like just because you don't have the scientific background doesn't mean you shouldn't be curious and lean into exploring with these things. Like, absolutely. Is there any um any like things that people should know before looking to experiment with biomaterials that make it different to say other material forms?
SPEAKER_01:That's a good question.
SPEAKER_02:Um I I think it's the same in the sense that if you're wanting to get involved in design, it's really about asking good questions and and trying things out as well. Um, there's a little less focus on the rigor side of things that's really important in STEM for like measure and measuring and analysis. In terms of um working with biomaterials, my only caution for someone new is that in the first couple of years of learning how to cultivate, I grew so much mold. I grew so much mold. So please just expect please just expect to um have you know challenges learning how to do cultivation and like learning how to collaborate with living organisms.
SPEAKER_00:Learning aseptic techniques.
SPEAKER_02:Yeah, they they're they're alive. Um, you know, I had a really amazing um sort of chat with Alia Parker on a panel once, who said um that she had to uh be intentional about what she was feeding her fungi because they would get bored of the same food source in the lab and they would just die of boredom. So, like, you know, you you're working with something alive.
SPEAKER_00:That is, that is wild.
SPEAKER_02:Yeah, they like a diverse diet just like we do.
SPEAKER_00:And which makes total sense. Um makes to question humans how we manage to survive off like a diet of chips and other things.
SPEAKER_03:But I I that's crazy.
SPEAKER_00:No, I just now that's got me wanting to ask you some more spicy or strange questions. Do you think, like, when you look at working with these living systems, do you think the different mushrooms have different personalities?
SPEAKER_02:They certainly have different growth habits, that's for sure. Like yeah, in some ways, they're very tenacious and interesting. Um, I think a lot of people are struck by how um sort of surprising they are. They sort of emerge really suddenly and they're very mysterious, and usually a lot of their processes are happening underground and they're hidden. Um but even in the conditions that we're cultivating them, where we can see them, we can see how they're growing, um, they still surprise us all the time by chewing through materials we didn't expect them to, or or fruiting randomly, or just producing the most beautiful forms we've ever seen, just just naturally without trying too hard. So it's pretty impressive.
SPEAKER_00:So, what would you say has been your favorite surprise? You've come in and been like, that is I was not expecting that.
SPEAKER_02:Yeah, it's usually something like we'll be growing a piece and it might just get like put under a table or something, and you'll be going and looking for something else, and you'll pull out this block and it's got dinner plate-sized mushrooms there, and you've just scored dinner for the whole team because we had unexpected harvest. Like they they just do surprising things all on their own.
SPEAKER_00:So, to clarify, in the process of turning the living organism into a final product, usually there is a process of let's say devitalization, or is that not always the case?
SPEAKER_02:It's not always the case. Like you can simply air dry them, they're gonna be sort of um able to be like regrown by being rehydrated at that point. Um, most of the materials are heat treated to make them inert and non-living, right? So um that just ensures that you've just got a base material that's not going to be.
SPEAKER_00:Your fungi's not gonna eat into your speaker, which you're transporting or storing.
SPEAKER_02:Yeah, it just creates a consistent um end product. So most of the materials are heat treated in that way. Um, some pieces we don't um sort of uh stop the fungi growing because we want to grow more later in the process. Just depends what outcome you want.
SPEAKER_00:So when you say later later in the process, I'd be curious to know what you would be making that you would want that to fruit. Or is it like you might get it to fruit and then you heat treat it again? Like, are you like obviously the mycelium is fascinating, but I've seen like a lot of art pieces where they'll have fruiting bodies as well because that's obviously quite provocative, or it's curious. Like, so would you then like a lot of the time are they then heat treated to maintain that for? longer or you can do that.
SPEAKER_03:Yeah.
SPEAKER_00:Interesting.
SPEAKER_02:But yeah, it's just all about fine-tuning those parts of the cultivation process to get the outcome that you want. So there's like the standard mycelium growth and then you have the the beautiful skin that you're able to produce on the outside that produces a different texture. And you've got the fruiting um component of it as well. So you can change the environmental conditions in that way.
SPEAKER_00:Right. So I guess riffing off that to provide an analogy so there's almost like a uh the different layers or different types of leather you can kind of have that with the fungi if if I'm going to interpret what you've said. So there's like a skin layer and then maybe if you shave that off you've got a Nubuck and then you can you potentially work with just that skin layer and then that is like a full grain leather.
SPEAKER_02:Yeah. So the mycelium has different properties at different parts of the material. What's the most wild mycelium composite or just mycelium-based product that you've seen recently can be one of your products if you really want I don't really mind um I've I've been um really interested in the idea of Australian um bushfire habitats for wildlife with mycelium taking advantage of the fire resistant properties the ability to create you know small molded forms I think it could have an incredible like um environmental and ecosystem impact. So that's an application that I think would be really exciting and specific to where we are and and the types of um challenges that we have here.
SPEAKER_00:That's fascinating because I was that was actually going to be another question I haven't even got around to asking for there's like a hundred more but I'm also wary of time. But I'd I would be so curious to know like on that note do you do you have like if you're going to ship something overseas and you're going to use fungal packaging do you need to ensure that it's like an oyster mushroom which everyone has everywhere so they're not going to worry about biocontamination or like because I can imagine I can see that you might have to cultivate and use Australian species in your products locally because we might have strict uh import regulations or biosecurity measures like I assume that this is one of the first things you had to think about with your packaging because you've done packaging for wine right yeah so the heat treatment process is what handles that so it just makes it a an a natural inert non-living can't regrow material. Does that kill spores?
SPEAKER_02:Yeah okay that that was just that that's it that's all I've got on that but um yeah on that note though with the the fire resistance with Australian fungi that is something that I've always thought is fascinating because we do come from a country where you have quite a lot of this happening and I would I wonder like what species are the most uh resilient in that way because I know we have Ganoderma which um grow a lot on eucalypts and I know that they were actually used as a means of transporting fire they would actually use them as a as an ember because they would burn for ages because they had quite a dense profile but what what fungi locally do you think is a really exciting sort of prospect from this uh flame resistant sort of side of things honestly we're just at the very beginning of understanding Australian fungi ecology in general let are let alone the potential applications that are sort of available to us with the species that we have here. So that is um a a really exciting challenge but one that's going to take many um mycology researchers and and um ecologists and that sort of thing. Our Australian Ganoderm is a very interesting and impressive species because they have incredibly dense leathery mycelium so they're incredible but so much opportunity um that's yet untapped in in Australian fungal um species.
SPEAKER_00:So on on the concept of untapped potential do you do you think that there's a role to play with um things like AI and machine learning when it comes to biomaterials? Like I know for example I'm sure you're familiar with Materium they're looking at doing an AI sort of platform for biomaterials and regenerative design. Do you think that things like this could play a really big role in helping people or helping at least raise awareness about these sort of materials and do you think that's something that you would look at in integrating or incorporating into your processes or RD sort of approach?
SPEAKER_02:That's a really good question. Yeah I I think it will be a really important part of the equation particularly when you're looking at um like scale and volume and creating larger impacts having modeling systems just helps us to work with bigger data sets and that sort of thing that are just really hard to grapple with as a single person. There's also all sorts of opportunities in terms of like automating your flows and and that sort of thing. We haven't sort of put any plans in place to have AI integration just yet. Still very much producing materials by hand. But I could see this being a really important part of the process when it comes to things like contamination and how you manage those sorts of challenges in a scaled up lab.
SPEAKER_00:And even I can imagine so I've I've done a lot of envisioning on this stuff because I find it so fascinating is that I can imagine even from like a like a lab ops or manufacturing ops side of things like having having a having something that can automatically monitor and and manage and maintain humidity temperature all of these sorts of things having like a like a like a lab management system with an AI interface where you could do these natural language commands or conversations it's just super cool. I really want to design something like that. I think it would be an incredibly fun way to I guess bring this sort of stuff to life and to scale in a way that might not mean that you don't have to have heaps of people doing boring and monotonous things and people can be spending more time playing and doing the RD that's the real fun things that humans are really good at um but yeah I don't know I just think there's so much space so much potential in that space I agree. Yeah what um oh what do you think we should sort of leave folks with is there any other thoughts on your mind that are rattling around or any updates? Like is there anything new that's happening at Fungi Solutions up like from an upcoming perspective? Any fun things from uh landing funding or collaborations? What's going on?
SPEAKER_02:Yeah we've just started um having some mycelium leather available for distribution so we're getting in contact with everyone to let them know that we have our hands on the goods and we're uh really excited about the RD pathway uh for the leather-based materials. Um there's a lot of uh potential in that sector and um having a more sustainable option for that type of material is going to be amazing. So we're very excited to um have the leather coming along and also plans for making it something really um high end and special in the future. So that's underway where um we've we've got our safe round of investment happening at the moment. So we've had some really amazing local supporters that are excited to see uh the mycelium solutions happening in Australia and we're preparing for scale up and a um more sophisticated investment strategy so it's underway um so if there are people in the network that um are really excited by climate solutions like that I'd recommend getting in touch it's the sweet spot I wish I wish I could get in touch with with bountiful amounts of money to support you I don't I don't have any but I wish I could but we've we've always been so supportive um collaboratively between our organizations so it's been wonderful.
SPEAKER_00:No that's that's it. Well thanks so much for carving out some time of your Friday afternoon for a chat. Yeah no it's been really lovely and I look forward to seeing what continues to emerge from the collaborative space between and yeah hopefully see you again on here sometime soon. Perfect thanks all right thanks so much for tuning in once again that was uh a delightful conversation with Amanda. Um yeah gonna keep this end really short and pretty much just stop talking thanks so much and enjoy the rest of your day night wherever you are around the world
