Plastic-hungry fungus rebuilds a community

Perched on the west coast of England in the largely rural county of Somerset is the harbor town of Watchet. It has a population of less than 4,000 but that number includes a handful of very determined, professional women.

The Onion Collective was formed in 2013, shortly after the collapse of plans for a major quayside development of apartments. Aiming to provide an alternative to purely commercial redevelopment, the Collective set out to empower the community. 

"The market doesn't really work here," says Onion Collective director Jessica Prendergast. "The state increasingly doesn't have any money here. We have the lowest social mobility in the whole country in this part of West Somerset. So if someone else doesn't do something, then the place just kind of quietly gets worse and worse."

Between them, its directors had wide-ranging previous experience in running community facilities, managing tourist attractions and cultural events, carrying out local environmental conservation work and conducting academic and government research. 

Having consulted the community, the Collective restored the local Boat Museum, erected a pavilion and a purpose-built visitor center, and restored a derelict field into a community garden. 

Redevelopment often comes as a possibility born of necessity: a rebirth from the death of something else. In Watchet's case, one of the town's biggest redevelopment possibilities came out of a closure that hit the town hard.

The people of Watchet had been making paper since 1652, and by the turn of the 20th century the Wansbrough Paper Mill was the UK's largest producer of paper bags. Over that century it began producing cardboard and then coreboard, a key building material – but in 2015, the plug was suddenly pulled. 

"It closed at the end of 2015, on Christmas Eve," recalls Onion Collective director Sally Lowndes. "And it was 175 jobs, so absolutely massive – 20 percent of the town's workforce lost their jobs overnight. Devastating." The closed mill stood slowly rotting, a melancholy emblem of manufacturing decline. 

However, out of threat can come opportunity. For Biohm, this was a population with a relevant skill-set: not just the manufacturing, but redevelopment via the Onion Collective. There's even a scalable factory available to operate from. 

But while Watchet would work for Biohm, would Biohm make sense to the people of Watchet? Was the manufacture of mycelium insulation panels a hard sell to the locals?

"I wouldn't say a hard sell. It was a confused sell," laughs Onion Collective director Georgie Grant. "Everyone was like, 'Wow! ...what?' But once you explain that mushrooms eat waste and you can make things from the roots of mushrooms then everyone's like, 'Oh wow, that's the future.'"

But it is. While scientists and mycologists (fungi experts) are in the know about the organisms' ability to eat plastic, it's big news to most of us – and a big opportunity for Biohm to not just make construction less bad for the planet, but actively to attack one of humankind's biggest pollution problems.

"At any given time, we're running hundreds of experiments on our plastic-eating mycelium," says Sayed – and no wonder, in such an exciting and potentially game-changing area. Biohm has received funding for this research from a large UK supermarket chain and even companies within the petrochemical industry have been in touch, interested in what mycelium could do. 

Normally plastic can take anywhere from 10 to 1,000 years to break down. But in Biohm's lab, one mycelium strain consumed a piece in two months. The company's lead bio-technology engineer Samantha Jenkins is testing the effectiveness of different strains on different plastics, and utilizing the inherent flexibility of microbes to react to their environment.

"Microbiological genomes are much more flexible than our own," she explains. "If, for example, you present them with an issue such as there's nothing to eat but plastic – which is our experimental set-up that we're using – then they can adapt and evolve much quicker than for example we could as 'higher organisms.' They're much more flexible with the enzymes they can produce, how they produce them and what function they can use them for."

Biohm is using what's called directed evolution in its experiments. 

"For example the characteristic we want to see is plastic degradation or faster plastic degradation, so we're taking away any other food source," says Jenkins. "And that's the stress we're putting on them: removing any food source that's easier to eat, so glucose or lignin or cellulose which is what they would normally eat."

The process is ongoing, but Jenkins and her team are zeroing in on the best candidates. "We started with about 15 strains and now we're down to about four – so we're narrowing it down to the cream of the crop."

Not that her work will be done when she picks a winner from that research process. Jenkins is also testing mycelium's ability to decompose plastic in water. One day, mycelium panels may even be grown from toxic byproducts such as plastic and oil, which would be harmlessly absorbed into the material. 

Sayed, too, is combining establishing these initial expansion plans with exploring next-phase possibilities. There are already plans to build another facility in England and a third in the Netherlands, as authorities consider the possibilities of an eco-friendly construction process that also consumes waste.

"We've been invited by governments and local authorities and social enterprises from around the globe – Australia, India, all over Europe – to set up our biomanufacturing facilities in their localities," says Sayed.

Eventually Sayed wants to open-source all their technologies, which will hopefully rebuild the construction industry. But that's the big picture; right now, Watchet locals just want to get their hands on their panels – as Jessica Prendergast knows only too well.

"I keep having to give out my phone number to people in Watchet now because everyone's like 'Right, when's it ready? When's it ready?' We're like, 'Okay, nearly, we're nearly there…' 

"It will be interesting to see how we deal with that combination of this big global demand – we know there's lots of interest from big firms who are kitting out huge numbers of houses – but also the local guys here and the small builders. Everyone wants to be a part of that story, so that's quite life-affirming."

Sayed agrees. "It's a really, really exciting way of showing how the industry is not separate to community, government and academia. We need to integrate all those different parts to really have a step change, especially at a time of climate crisis."