Eureka 439: Mad about mycelium 

0:15You're listening to Eureka on Monocle Radio, brought to you by the team behind the entrepreneurs, the show all about inspiring people, innovative companies, and fresh ideas in global business. I'm Tom Edwards. Marta Aguera Calero is a Spanish architect based in Berlin. She's also the co-founder and CEO of Material Alternative Design, a company making high-performance materials using mycelium, the root-like structure within mushrooms. That's exciting manufacturers because it's lightweight, strong, and biodegradable. Together, Marta and her Argentine business partner, Manuela Garcia, share a passion for indoor climbing and are taking the first steps to replace the 20 million plastic climbing holds produced every year with their inventions.

1:02So how do you turn mushrooms into climbing gear? Well, here is Marta with more.

1:15I have a company called MAD that stands for Material Alternative Design What we do, we are a material and design company aiming to disrupt unsustainable manufacturing practices And how we do this? We do it with mycelium Mycelium is a part of the mushrooms The fruiting body is the mushroom, and everything we don't see underneath the surface, that's mycelium. So it's the whole root-like structure of the mushroom. We use this material because when you combine this with an organic substrate, it acts like a natural binder, and you are able to create material composites. And this is what we do. So we want to replace all the unsustainable materials in the industry.

2:02We have started with plastic, and also we have started in the climbing industry. So I have a few samples. Here, the white part that you see, it's the mycelium. So that's the one that acts like a natural glue. And then inside, you can use natural elements like fibers, wood chips, or you can also experiment actually with this. And then the mushroom will grow inside and then it will make this kind of material. It's really light and it can become really strong. This is our specialty. We develop high-performance materials because we combine it with another component. What we are focused on is high performance.

2:46So here this one with another bio-resin on top, then we are able to make it stronger. Also for the grip, because in the climbing industry you need a grip, so it has sand. Our secret sauce is the combination of two elements. Yeah, we cannot tell it yet.

3:05We entered into the climbing industry because it was the fastest way to create an impact. Because we had access to the community. The people are so eager to have a solution. It's part of the Olympics game right now, bouldering and sport climbing. And it is incredible the amount of equipment that is produced every year. and they don't realize, okay, it's all made out of unsustainable material that end up being just burned or trashed. So what we also figure out by talking to different players at the beginning before we enter, okay, we want to do this, is there was a huge delay in the industry by six months, three months, up until a year to get new material because the demand was so high and also the production was not able to be met.

3:53But we also know that the quality of the material has decreased of the plastic itself. And before they used to last eight years, five years. And now after two years, they get chipped. The grip also warns out quite easily. So we were like, OK, what if we change the whole way of thinking about the climbing poles? Or even like product itself, right? Because when we think about plastic product, they last forever. This was the idea that it was sold to us. We don't want it to last forever, in a way, if it only harms the environment. So a plastic hole would last 500 years. Our holes, they only need to last two, three years.

4:34It's enough because then after we can take them back and we can shred them down or we can compose them and then we don't produce waste.

4:47so I'm a person that has been always obsessed with finding other kind of materials I come from my background is architecture and design I'm an architect I could build a house I haven't but we are developing now a construction system truly the potential it's really huge what we want to explore is the high performance properties of mycelium and how you can combine it with other things and to increase the properties of itself. We want to explore the construction industry or the automotive, well actually our dream. Our dream is aerospace. We met ESA and we were talking about it because they are really searching, yeah, for sure, for materials.

5:38They are really needed. So our really big vision would be to be able to bring this material to the aerospace.

5:57space. That was Marta Agueda-Calero, the co-founder and CEO of MAD, material alternative design. And you can learn more by heading to wearenotmad.com. And that's all for this episode of Eureka. My thanks to Ian Wiley for his reporting. We'll be back at the same time next week and as ever, do look out for the Entrepreneurs available every Wednesday. Eureka was produced by Laura Kramer with audio editing by Jack Dewars. Listen and find out more at monocle.com or follow us wherever you get your audio. If you'd like to contact the team, do email Laura on lrk at monocle.com. I'm Tom Edwards. Goodbye and thanks for listening to Eureka.

6:44Thank you.