In just a few years, the plant-based start-up Mycocycle has demonstrated remarkable progress leveraging mycelium to break down, detoxify and transform some of our hardest-to-recycle construction waste into valuable, biobased materials. The company was founded in 2018 by CEO Joanne Rodriguez whose decades of experience as a sustainability leader in the building industry opened her eyes to the stark statistics around construction waste. The construction and demolition sectors comprise an estimated one third of the world’s overall waste and produce approximately 11% of all greenhouse gas emissions. Upwards of 75% of construction waste ends up in landfills or incinerators.

Working with a mycologist, Rodriguez, a Chain Reaction Innovations (CRI) Cohort 6 innovator, discovered that not only would fungi grow on asphalt, but that it could also be trained to “eat” petrochemical-containing waste the same way fungi decompose trees in the forest. And this “waste” created in the process — a raw, mycelium-based material — had enormous potential to create new, low-carbon building materials for an industry struggling to gain a foothold in a zero-waste circular economy.

“There is huge body of work around how mycelium can remediate toxins, but no one was at the intersection of applying mycelium to industrial waste, let alone transforming this material into something of value,” Rodriguez said. “Mycocycle is taking construction materials that contain plastics and petroleum, derisking them and transforming them into a new mycelium-based material that can be used to create new composite materials for use in construction.”

Rodriguez spent two years building Mycocycle and officially launched the Bolingbrook, IL-based business in 2020. In 2022, Rodriguez joined the two-year CRI entrepreneurship program which embeds innovators at the U.S. Department of Energy’s (DOE) Argonne National Laboratory to help them refine and de-risk their early-stage technologies and bring them more quickly to market.

Mycocycle’s research and development team is working in Argonne’s Applied Materials Division with Meltem Urgun-Demirtas, who leads Bioprocesses and Reactive Separations, to validate the science and to derisk and optimize the micro-remediation process.

How it Works

Mycocycle, which grows and cultivates its fungi in-house, developed a patent-pending process that takes approximately three weeks to strip toxins from construction waste and create new, raw materials. The three-step process begins by grinding and blending waste with Mycocycle’s mycelium treatment. The materials are incubated in the company’s containerized solution, MYCOntainer, to ensure toxic waste is processed in a climate-controlled environment. The raw material is then harvested for reuse in new bio-based construction materials such as fillers and fibers used in the building industry.

Mycocycle’s mycelium treatment is fire and water resistant, insulative, durable, and light weight – a perfect raw material for the building industry. “This new material could replace a plastic polymer, or it could replace something like calcium carbonate, which is the number one filler used in all the materials around the world,” Rodriguez said.

During CRI, Mycocycle focused solely on rubber — one of the most toxic and hardest-to-recycle substances. “Choosing rubber was strategic for us because the issue is so enormous, and it’s so critical to create a waste-free solution,” Rodriguez said. “Doing this work on rubber and gaining scientific validation from Argonne is a very impressive stamp of approval.”

The team is learning to optimize from Urgun-Demirtas, who has experience in the design and operation of chemical and bioprocesses, scaling biotechnology and techno-economic analysis and modeling. “Meltem is able to steer us away from mistakes she has seen others make and help guide us towards more efficient applications at scale through science,” Rodriguez said.

Progress

In just four years, Mycocycle has made gains across the board. The business is currently working with 15 companies, has treated 132,000 of waste material and reduced 396,000 pounds of carbon emissions. On average, Mycocycle’s treatment reduces the toxicity of materials by up to 98%.

Mycocycle has filed five patents, including for its bioremediation process and its mycelium treatment solution. Mycocycle’s patent-pending products, MycoFILL, MycoFIBER, and MycoFOAM, are bio-based alternatives to conventional construction materials.

Rodriguez, who has been recognized for her work by Forbes Magazine, FastCompany, and the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA), expanded the company to 12 full- and part-time employees. Along with securing additional funding, Rodriguez says getting corporations to change their mindset about recycling solutions is a major challenge going forward.

“Corporate innovation doesn’t happen quickly,” she said. “We (innovators) tend to move like speed boats, and they move like warships. But Mycocycle and all CRI innovators have a real opportunity to become the corporate innovation arm for any of the industries we serve.”