Mushrooms Turned into Green Packaging
 In addition to tomatoes and peppers, your next garden could grow packaging materials.
A new product made out of agricultural waste and mushroom roots is now showing up in shipped products across the country. The composite material, called Mycobond™, requires just one-eighth the energy to produce and generates one-tenth the carbon dioxide of traditional foam packing material.
Now Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute undergraduates Gavin McIntyre and Eben Bayer are developing a new, less energy-intensive method to sterilize the agricultural waste, killing spores that could otherwise compete with the mushrooms.
Instead of steam heat, the new sterilization method will involve cinnamon-bark oil, thyme oil, oregano oil and lemongrass oil. [more]
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