Growing Change -- In the Dark

Eben Bayer has declared war on Styrofoam - what he calls "that toxic white stuff" that can be found in the walls of your home, in coffee cups, in packaging, in your back yard and along the sides of the highway. Styrofoam, he says, takes up more space in landfills than any other type of trash.

And the famous Garbage Patch -- that floating island of plastic trash in the Pacific Ocean that's bigger than Texas? It, too, contains a huge amount of ground-up Styrofoam, Bayer says -- and it's killing the birds and fish that feed on it. "Our planet's toxic addiction to plastics is poisoning our environment and our bodies," he says.

So Bayer, the son of a Vermont farmer, and his ex-classmate, Gavin McIntyre, co-founded Ecovative Design, a new company based in Green Island, N.Y., that uses the fibers in mushroom roots and seed husks to produce a type of organically-grown material -- called "greensulate" -- that can be used as a Styrofoam replacement. [The two met as mechanical-engineering students at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute.]

But don't look for an assembly line at the 10-employee firm. Look for dark rooms instead. Ecovative grows mycelium (mushroom roots) in a bed of agricultural by-products including buckwheat husks. After about 10-14 days, the root systems, seeded on metal panels, are baked in an oven at between 100 and 150 degrees Fahrenheit and then "harvested" for use in any number of applications. One top app, Bayer says, is called "Ecocradle" - a strong, paper-like material that has the same thermal and physical properties as Styrofoam.

"This material is 100 percent compostable in your own garden," Bayer says, "and for each unit of this material that we create, we release 10 times less CO2 that's in the same volume of Styrofoam and use eight times less energy."

But Bayer isn't stopping there. To help market the product, Bayer has launched an online awareness campaign that asks people around the world to take pictures of the Styrofoam waste they see -- using their camera phones or computers -- and to email them to stop@toxicwhitestuff.com. Bayer plans to aggregate all such content into a Web site that he says will be the equivalent of "a loud, resounding, global 'no'" which he hopes will encourage others to come up with similarly new materials "to replace the thousands of plastics polluting the environment today."

So far, Bayer's Ecocradle and "white stuff war" has earned him a new round of public attention. Bayer, Ecovative's CEO and a 2009 PopTech Fellow, just announced that Ecovative won the Opportunity Green OG25 competition and that his "Ecocradle" is being featured as one of 100 top innovations in the December issue of Popular Science.

Not bad for two 24-year-olds out to grow environmental change that's sustainable.