Compostable fungi-based replacement for styrofoam
soma.eco
soma.eco
[0] - https://www.cruzfoam.com [1] - https://www.cruzfoam.com/post/meet-our-new-investors-advisor...
You mix it up and then all you need is just the wooden frame (if you're building load bearing walls), then you wrap it in hempcrete (floors, walls & roof), apply some mud plaster and you're done. No need for 6-10 layers full of plastics & glues.
Thanks to use of lime instead of cement the building even captures CO2, as the walls literally turn into stone over time.
Some hemp buildings are 200+ years old, in some cave in india they've even found 1500 y.o. hempcrete, and you can compost whole building at EOL.
Some other benefits: non-toxic, no off-gassing, no solvents, mold resistance, high vapor permeability, humidity control, durable, sustainable, carbon sequestration, fire and pest resistance, passive self regulation of temperature and humidity, great insulator
FWIU, lime requires coral for production? Is lime sustainable?
Alternative solutions for: structural wood frame in a hempcrete structure: stacking hempcrete blocks on structural forms that are stronger and more insulting than structural concrete; green concrete, a carbon and thermal gradient sink; and Hempwood, which is apparently stronger than spec lumber of the same dimensions as well.
the process of producing lime can involve a number of not-very-sustainable steps, hopefully which can be substituted for more environmentally responsible alternatives
And they're pretty solid, so snaking a power or network line through the walls after the construction is done -- that's not really very feasible.
And it takes a long time for the hempcrete "bricks" to dry. Although once dried, they are sprayed with a mixture that makes them pretty waterproof, IIRC.
If you can design around the very thick walls, then I think it's wonderful. But you've got to make some changes to your design and assembly process to accommodate the building material in question.
I think Matt Risinger has some nice videos about hempcrete on his "Build Show" channel on YouTube.
> And they're pretty solid, so snaking a power or network line through the walls after the construction is done -- that's not really very feasible.
It's not as hard material as concrete is, so with some hand tools it should be easy enough [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NDfzgZ8d0Cc].
> And it takes a long time for the hempcrete "bricks" to dry.
Yes, that's true. It may take weeks/months, depending on the weather conditions. But ... all "wet" building techniques require some time for drying, so in my country it's non-issue.
> Although once dried, they are sprayed with a mixture that makes them pretty waterproof, IIRC.
If I remember correctly, I've seen some video, where hempcrete building stood directly on the beachfront, with no special treatment, and it withstood the elements admirably.
When my wife and I lived in Brussels for almost eight years in a townhouse that was built just after the turn of the 20th century (1910?), one thing we noted was the extremely thick walls. That kind of construction made sense at that time in that location. Modern construction methods in that same area would be thinner, but probably not like what we would typically see here in the US.
Many people in the US don't realize how far north a lot of Europe is. For example, Brussels is on about the same latitude as Toronto and Seattle. And Belgium is not part of what I would consider Northern Europe.
So, hempcrete construction in Europe might be a lot closer to the type of wall thickness you would normally see over there. And the fact that this is a solid construction material versus the hollow "balloon stick framing" technique we see for most home construction in the US -- that might be less of a problem for you.
I personally would like to see a lot more PassivHaus class building here in the US, and a lot more hempcrete in general. But both of those things are going to require a huge shift in the mindset of most builders here in the US.
Hempcrete is not only for winter months and keeping heat inside. It's also very good for keeping the heat outside of the building in summer.
[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_5lDwBiQNc0 - Israel, no need for air conditioner, hempcrete keeps inside temperature between 20-25C all year round]
I do feel that hempcrete would be a good building choice for a lot of places in the US, based on insulation capacity and relatively low cost of materials.
But the cost of labor to build with it would be higher, due to lack of familiarity with the materials, and it would take longer to build with -- especially compared to prefab or other higher speed building methods. And then there's the increased cost in labor to do the interior fittings.
I am a fan of hempcrete. But it will take significant adjustments to the building process here in the US.
Modern "stick framing" construction is much thinner. Interior walls are four to five inches thick, depending on the actual dimensions of your 2x4 "sticks" and the drywall on either side of that. Exterior walls tend to be a bit thicker, depending on what kind of exterior surface you've chosen to put on the face.
If you want to build to PassivHaus standards with modern construction, then Matt shows examples of that in his video series, and yes the walls are thicker than we would normally see. But still not as thick as you'd get with hempcrete.
I'm not saying hempcrete is bad, I'm just saying that there is a factor there you have to take into consideration when you're looking at doing hempcrete construction for your walls.
The problem with running cables and pipes through hempcrete is that it is a solid material throughout. In modern "stick frame" construction, there is typically no interior insulation and nothing between those two sheets of drywall, other than the 2x4 sticks that are 16 inches on center. So, with all that empty space in the walls, it's much easier to run cables and pipes.
Again, not a deal breaker. But it is something you have to account for. And your current architects and construction crew will have to think and work harder now, in order to make life more livable for future architects and construction crews -- and future owners.
In a crowded Island like the UK, doubling the wall thickness absolutely makes a difference.
It seems fundamentally difficult to have a material that can hold up for decades but then biodegrade once we decide it is EOL.
Just think about how even typical composting works where the point is to keep temperatures of the compost pile going in order to aid the process of breaking the material down in an acceptable timeframe.
Mineral wool is just hot rocks, a far better insulator, and completely immune to water.
[https://ecoreactor.org/hempcrete-2/]
Hempcrete is waterproof. It is highly versatile and features desirable structural and moisture-handling properties. Depending on the mix variables, hempcrete makes an ideal choice for insulation, flooring, drywall, and roofing. Hempcrete is also fireproof and rot-proof.
...
Unlike Portland cement that needs water to hydrate, hempcrete takes on moisture when it exists and releases it when the conditions allow. Research indicates that hempcrete blocks fabricated and stored in different weather conditions – without any coating – for a few months showed water vapor pressure between 1000 Pa for the drier block and 1600 Pa for the moister one.
...
Besides, hempcrete cannot be overwhelmed when it comes to adsorbing of moisture thanks to the vast storage capacity with a sustained elevated humidity of 93 percent. Therefore, high levels of moisture don’t propagate deeply into the hempcrete.
...
The lime coating in each hemp block creates a surface that resists the development of mold, even when the conditions cause decay. The resilience to tackle humidity and liquid moisture makes it a desirable choice and a unique insulation material in hot and cold climates.
Their pitch is that unlike other sheep wool based insulation theirs doesn't have issues with insects moving in, I guess the high heat means it's not edible and absorb water any more.
EDIT: Isolena in Austria is the company.
They seem to be one of the only ones whose insulation is purely wool and doesn't have a bunch of recycled plastic in it as well.
Heritage House has an (opinionated) article:
https://www.heritage-house.org/stuff-about-old-buildings/ins...
Edit 2: It's Plasma treated not heat treated.
Strip it out of the plastic and a dog or cat will go nuts rolling in it!
WRT house insulation What happens if it gets wet. Moisture is mentioned in the article briefly but not really addressed properly.
The mushroom product doesn’t have any info on thermal insulation properties. Which is the key market. As someone else mentioned, it’s vague
Seems like the best available today.
For cavity wall insulation, dense packed cellulose is a carbon negative option currently widely available.
And if you are building a new custom home, you'd be crazy not to surpass code for insulation, given the operational energy savings.
Matt Risinger has some nice videos on examples of doing that on his "Build Show" channel on YouTube.
Though these shouldn't be worse than the plastic/styrofoam that is so prevalent today.
It's hard to tell with any given product, and most manufacturers in the former category are more than happy to coyly suggest the latter. Not saying anything about this particular product, but it's a thing I've been noticing more.
Very cool stuff, my take-away from reading about earlier fungi-base packaging is that it is hard to scale in a cost effective way. I've grown oyster mushroom "leather" which was fun, but took about 6 weeks for a 3" diameter.
That is, what is the scarce resource for oyster mushroom leather, given that forestry requires a dozen years?
EDIT: (fungal aspect) seed it with the right spores for container shipping and you get some free penicillin upon delivery!
e.g. The site claims that production uses "98% lest energy than expanded polystyrene" and is produced from waste. Does this include the cost of growing the fungus? The language is ambiguous.
Mushrooms are one of the less energy and water intensive edible crops that can be grown. If you wanted to make an environmentally friendly bio-material, fungus is a great choice versus corn or other vegetables.
However, transporting waste to fungus farms, sorting the waste, growing the fungus, etc. are not costs that should be neglected when trying to compare the environmental impact of this material to styrofoam and other styrofoam alternatives.
> Aerogels are produced by extracting the liquid component of a gel through supercritical drying or freeze-drying. This allows the liquid to be slowly dried off without causing the solid matrix in the gel to collapse from capillary action, as would happen with conventional evaporation. The first aerogels were produced from silica gels. Kistler's later work involved aerogels based on alumina, chromia and tin dioxide. Carbon aerogels were first developed in the late 1980s.[12]
Can aerogels be made with {formed,?} fungi-based production processes?
Fundamentally they are defined when you remove a solvent from a gel supercritically. High temperatures or pressures. Not very friendly for organics, but probably could work with a polymer.
Of course if you just want a low density polymer with air in it that's just styrofoam. The organic part is the interesting bit, and organic stuff usually has better strength due to multi-dimensional patterning whereas an aerogel would tend to have a single structure throughout.
HS chem was years ago. Does jsmol/pymol work in Jupiter notebooks? That probably doesn't at all model heat or other QFT or QG fields.
Though this one probably doesn't require an understanding of how quantum chemistry is actually occurring (Q12 STEM), I found this for protyping, which "operates on abstract data structures allowing the formulation, combination, automatic differentiation and optimization of generalized objectives. Tequila can execute the underlying quantum expectation values on state of the art simulators as well as on real quantum devices." https://github.com/tequilahub/tequila#quantum-backends
If the chemicals used to make an aerogel are carbon sinks, the aerogel will be as well unless the energy use is higher than the sunk carbon.
If it's not biological, it's usually not a carbon sink. There are exceptions.
And as for outgassing, in my experience any polymer that you do gas sampling over in a closed container will be show some offgassing of something. It's just the nature of solids to release vapor, if there is zero in the gas phase then there's a lot of entropic force to drive there to be at least one in the gas phase. Like, a huge entropic driving force. Everything outgasses.
Whether there's a lot of outgassing depends on the chemicals that are broken down and the volatility and the temperature, I think this will almost always be low but measurable for long chain polymers, and modest for short chain and low density polymers (think how foam insulation smells when it gets heated in the sun if you've ever seen it). What is outgassed is definitely more important, so it really just is super case by case to do an actual safety analysis to compare them, and it would depend on the use conditions (temperature, sunlight, etc).
I don't know anything about jsmol or pymol, I don't think a software suite is necessary here. These processes are pretty basic and you can just look up relative volatilities and breakdown products for a given case. You definitely don't want to try to simulate the thermal breakdown of a polymer (which you'd define statistically with potentially hundreds of thousands of atoms each) -- especially not quantum mechanically -- into the gas phase. There are a lot of opportunities for much more basic issues than software libraries; like how you model the gas around the solid surface and what the structure of the solid surface is. Does gas move due to outside flow? Does it also carry away heat?
It's a hugely complex thing to actually calculate (and even for a few atoms QM simulations are horrific and easy to mess up) so instead I personally would just rely on the rules of thumb I talked about first and then look up actual data from bulk materials property measurements. I definitely wouldn't touch a simulation when real bulk property measurements are easily available.
So it's cheaper? By how much?
If you genuinely come up with something better and are able to get into the market, that's great... but don't try to sell "compostable" as a feature. I don't want my packaging to potentially come rotten.
In general happy that business are going this way.
The problem is when you emit CEO that has been absorbed over hundreds of millions of years and fossilized in oil and gas all within 100 years or so.
This typo made my day.
I could see making something like this from food waste and then just burying it in the ground.
I already have to deal with rotted cardboard insulation, mice-chewed foam and the like when restoring old products; with things like this, it makes me wonder what those of the future will have to face, or indeed whether there will be anything left to preserve. The mentions of "regulatory action" are likewise similarly disturbing. Perhaps historians will call it the eco-plague.
The name also sounds more like an antibiotic than a packaging material.
Meanwhile a compostable material such as fungi can be broken down and reintroduced into the environment in a minimally destructibe way. The same cannot be said of plastics. Also fungi make good fertilizer as well.