Focus, Flexibility, and the launch of a radical new material (made from mushrooms!)

Last week, leading furniture manufacturer, Steelcase Company, announced that they will begin shipping their furniture using EcoCradle as a protective packaging material.  EcoCradle is an environmentally responsible packaging material that is actually grown from agricultural byproducts and mushrooms.

EcoCradle requires no petroleum to manufacture (unlike Styrofoam) and is 100% compostable in your own backyard or garden. EcoCradle flips the idea of packaging waste on its head, because with EcoCradle after you unpack your shipment, you are actually getting something that can enhance your garden soil, not a waste product that stays in a landfill for 10,000 or more years.

Today also marks an important milestone in the mainstream adoption of sustainable materials. This adoption is particularly encouraging as it occurs during one of our most acute fossil fuel disasters yet: The Gulf oil spill. Never has the need to move away from fossil fuels been more concretely demonstrated then through this disturbing event that is causing so much environmental damage and economic hardship.

As the 2008 Green Challenge winner, and co-inventor of EcoCradle, I wanted to share with you the story of how we got to where we are today and some of the key ingredients, namely: Flexibility and Focus.

It all started more than 3 years ago at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute in New York State, where two undergraduates, Gavin McIntyre and I, were working on an alternative to rigid foam insulation. Our idea was to use mushrooms and crop byproducts to actually "grow" a new material. We developed this innovation to the point of a start-up, and began the arduous task of actually commercializing this disruptive technology. In 2008 we applied to be part of the Green Challenge and in an astonishing turn of universal alignment, became finalists and eventually winners, receiving €500,000 (approximately $700,000) to turn our vision into a reality.IMG_0048

Insulation

Prior to winning the Green Challenge everyone at Ecovative had been very focused on a single goal: using our material platform to create a new insulation, Greensulate™, which would displace existing synthetic materials used to insulate buildings. We had good reasons for this. Current rigid insulations require lots of energy to produce, relies on oil as a feedstock and consumers had no real environmentally responsible alternatives.

But in January 2009 we asked ourselves a very important question: "Is this focus the best way to make the biggest and fastest impact with our technology?".

We had spent several years testing Greensulate to many different ASTM standards, and were discovering that we would have to test again and more extensively, on much bigger sizes of the product. We also needed to perform many test installations before major vendors would carry it. We were well aware that Styrofoam, a material often used to insulate homes, was also used to package everything from tables to televisions. It wasn't until we dug into the numbers that we realised that there was actually more Expanded Polystyrene (EPS) used each year in packaging, then in building construction. And EPS packaging is only used for a matter of weeks before being relegated to a landfill, or incinerated.

Packaging

We realised that packaging presented an even greater opportunity to have an impact with our technology. This is why flexibility is so important. We had put an incredible amount of energy in developing Greensulate and were scheduled to install it in a number of buildings that Spring. We had even been awarded €500,000 to bring the product to market from the Green Challenge. But we saw the opportunity to do something even better. And we shifted our efforts to instead produce EcoCradle packaging.

EcoCradle development began in earnest in early 2009. By the middle of the year we had a number of potential customers and by Fall 2009 we were shipping limited quantities. During this period we gained the skills we needed to scale Greensulate™ and EcoCradle™.  Now in mid 2010 we are proudly shipping EcoCradle™ in greater and greater volumes.

This would not have been possible without flexibility, the ability to see and evaluate other options and take calculated steps to change directions. But it also would not have been possible without focus, the ability to stand by our vision and plan, as we continued to learn more, understand the need better and refine our strategy for achieving our goals and vision.

Possible applications

In the development of our material technology we have identified many possible applications- insulation, packaging, surfboards, furniture, auto-parts, consumer products, cup holders, coolers, display cases, bee hives and many more. If we had changed course every time a new promising application appeared we would have nothing but half finished prototypes. Yet if we had been unwilling to be flexible, to explore and consider new opportunities, we might still by testing and re-testing our original idea, rather than actually making shipments and an impact today.

Entrepreneurship

One of the keys in entrepreneurship is balancing these two disparate goals: embracing flexibility while keeping a laser focus on your vision and plan. Ecovative has so far been able to do this.  Meanwhile, we continue to work toward producing a sustainable insulation. And I am happy to say that we have received $700,000 in funding this year from the National Science Foundation, the New York State Energy Research and Development Authority, and the Environmental Protection Agency to complete large scale tests of Greensulate.

We have many other exciting applications on the horizon, but for the moment, we are remaining focused on Greensulate and EcoCradle.

Eben Bayer