Mycomaterials
Learn · The frontier of living materials
Mycomaterials
A material doesn't have to be mined or assembled in a factory. It can be grown — in days, from a waste product — and returned to the earth without leaving a scar.
The material that growsAn object that was once alive
Beneath every mushroom stretches the mycelium: a network of impossibly fine filaments that digests dead matter and returns it to the cycle of life. Give it a waste product and a mold, and that network grows, binds, and hardens organic waste until it becomes packaging, leather, brick. It happens in three steps.
This architecture makes no distinction between an edible mushroom and a laboratory mold: all of them spin the same web. That's why science eventually named the entire kingdom with a single word — funga, alongside fauna and flora. We tell that story in the Funga Manifesto.
Waste
It starts with a cheap, abundant agricultural byproduct — sawdust, straw, husk, bagasse — inoculated with a fungus.
Mycelium
Within days, the mycelium colonizes every gap and binds the particles until they fuse into a single solid, lightweight, insulating piece.
Object
Drying halts its growth. What remains is a firm, compostable material, born from waste and able to return to it.
It's no longer theoryWhat the world is already building
These aren't laboratory promises. They're materials already dressing luxury houses, protecting shipments, and raising structures. The names are real; the links lead to those doing it right now.
That composts in your garden
The first ground gained. Mycelium grows inside a mold, takes on its exact shape, and replaces styrofoam — that white foam that takes centuries to break down. It protects just as well, weighs less, and returns to the earth in 45 days.
Skin without animal or petroleum
Grown in sheets and treated, mycelium mimics the texture and strength of leather without sacrificing an animal or tanning with chemicals. Hermès brought it to a handbag; General Motors, to a car's interior.
A wall that was once alive
Pressed or grown into blocks, mycelium yields acoustic panels, thermal insulation, and low-emission bricks — lighter than concrete and able to absorb carbon as they grow. A tower of 10,000 living bricks has already risen in MoMA's courtyard, and NASA is studying how to grow habitats on the Moon and Mars with it.
How a revolution is bornFrom an absurd idea to dressing Hermès
None of these companies started big. Almost all of them were born from an obsession, a waste product, and an unlikely space. That's how the materials of the future are conceived, from the very start.
A puck under a bed
Eben Bayer grew up watching mycelium bind wood chips together on his family's Vermont farm. With Gavin McIntyre, he grew a palm-sized piece under his college dorm-room bed. That puck founded Ecovative, today a world reference in mycelium packaging.
A tower in MoMA's courtyard
Studio The Living raised Hy-Fi, a 13-meter tower built from 10,000 mycelium bricks. It wasn't a sculpture: it was a manifesto that you can build without concrete or steel, and without leaving a scar.
A basement in the Bajío
Two brothers, Axel and Alexis Gómez-Ortigoza, together with scientist Bárbara González Rolón, founded Polybion in an improvised lab in Salamanca. Mexico entered the race from our own soil.
From artist's sculpture to luxury handbag
Artist Phil Ross had spent years sculpting with mycelium; his material was presented at the Venice Architecture Biennale. After three years of joint work, MycoWorks and Hermès launched the Victoria bag in Sylvania — mushroom leather with the maison's finish.
Right here, close to home
Mexico weaves its threadThe revolution is Guanajuato's too
Few countries are as well positioned for this frontier as Mexico. We are a land of agricultural byproducts — corn cobs, sugarcane bagasse, stubble, straw — that today are burned or left to rot, and that a fungus can turn into noble matter. And we are one of the deepest mycological cultures on the planet.
We don't have to look far. In Irapuato, Guanajuato — our own state — Polybion was born. Its first material, Fungicel, is mycelium-grown packaging made from agricultural waste: compostable, flame-retardant, a direct substitute for styrofoam. From that basement they went on to build a solar-powered biofabrication plant and to talk with global brands.
Simbiosis exists at that crossing. We don't import a trend: we build a bridge between the traditional knowledge of the mushroom — the one nanacateras have read in mycelium for centuries — and the frontier of materials, so that innovation is born here, from the waste of our own fields.
Our science also says what's still missingThe honest frontier
We don't promise mycelium will replace plastic tomorrow
It's a young technology, and honesty is part of our science. Producing at scale is still slow next to a plastic factory; moisture resistance, part uniformity, and cost are still being worked out; and not every fungal material suits every use.
We share this frontier not as a finished product, but as a promise in progress — one we'd rather tell with its limits in plain sight than sell with exaggeration.
Let's talk
If you design, cook, build, or imagine with materials, and this frontier moves you, let's talk. We're looking for allies — brands, design studios, architects, researchers — to grow together what the world doesn't yet know can grow.
Write to usCurious Fungívoro? Mycelium can also be grown at home: grow.bio offers kits to grow your own material.