• Fungal growth used to upcycle unsorted textile waste into high-strength composites. • Achieves tensile strength suitable for semi-structural applications (up to 14 MPa). • Process enables mushroom production from same textile feedstock. • Composites are biodegradable, repairable, and reconfigurable by hydration. • Contaminated and blended textile waste is directly usable with no preprocessing. Textile waste from ‘fast fashion’ has considerable environmental impact and is an EU priority area. Colonising textiles with fungi provides a unique solution, with options to bond them together to create composite materials, fruit them to provide mushrooms (source of chitin-glucan complex), or both. We produced mycelium-textile composites in analogy to traditional prepreg-based composite manufacturing, consolidating multiple textile stacks colonised with Ganoderma lucidum into a single material of customisable thickness and free-form geometry. An oxygen gradient existed through the cross-section of textile stacks, resulting in more growth on surface than core plies. Consolidated composites comprising only surface layers achieved tensile strengths up to ∼14 MPa. Their flexural and shear strengths (7 MPa and 0.5 MPa, respectively) indicated suitability for semi-structural construction applications. Waste textile substrate could also be fruited (5.7% w/w yield). These advances expand the stalled application of mycelium composites and provide a nature-based solution to textile upcycling.
Silm et al. (Tue,) studied this question.