Fungi Breaking Down Diapers with Hiro Technologies
Alisa Nappa
Today we sit down with Danielle Stevenson and Tero Isokauppila of the newly launched Hiro Technologies to talk about how fungi can break down diapers. Piling up in our landfills with an assortment of hard to break down plastics, fungi come to the rescue yet again. Tune in and Shroom in to todays episode.
Sign up for our podcast giveaway here. Our next winner will be selected on February 18, 2025 and contacted via email.
TRANSCRIPT
Lera 0:11 Alex, welcome. Welcome. You are listening to the mushroom revival podcast. I'm your host, Alex door, and we are unbelievably stoked on the magical, wonderful world of mushrooms and fungi. We bring on guests and experts from all around the globe to geek out with us and go down this mysterious rabbit hole to try to figure out what the heck is going on in this fungal kingdom. And today, we have Danielle and taro from a new company hero to talk about Myco compostable, or Myco degradable, or mushroom infused diapers, which is a really cool project, and I'm stoked to have them on the show. So how y'all doing? Unknown Speaker 0:53 Good? Yeah, Unknown Speaker 0:55 best day ever. Speaker 1 0:57 Yeah, you're tuning in from the new lab in Austin, which is awesome. So for people who don't know who you two are, I brought Tara on a couple times, but Danielle, you're new to the show, so welcome. What are you guys up to? Who are you guys Speaker 2 1:14 sure I can start since I'm new so my name's Danielle Stevenson. I have a PhD in environmental toxicology, where my dissertation research focused on Myco remediation of brownfields in LA and I've also been running a mushroom business called DIY fungi since 2012 and through DIY fungi carried out a lot of different Myco remediation studies around you know, land and waste cleanup with fungi. Also the founder of healing city soils program and other sort of land regeneration programs. And I'm currently the head of R and D at hero technologies. That's an important thing to add. That's why I'm here. Speaker 3 2:04 Yeah, and I'm Taro, originally from Finland, 13 generation family farmer, founder of Four Sigmatic early in the functional mushroom space, and co founder of hero and author of a few mushroom books. Speaker 1 2:19 Right on. So Danielle, me and you have been friends for Since 2015, probably 10 years now, maybe a bit shorter, I can't remember, but we've been talking about micromediation since day one. But how did it begin for you two? How did that journey into micromediation Start? Speaker 2 2:39 Yeah, the deep roots for me are that I grew up in a polluted place, seeing also how nature heals itself. And when I got into urban agriculture work in my early 20s and started finding out that soil was polluted and we couldn't grow food, that's really when I dove into the world of fungi and trying to learn. Tried to learn as much as I could about, you know, how to work with fungi, to clean up soil. So that's really how I got into Myco remediation. Speaker 3 3:12 I'm somewhat polar opposite. I grew up in a very pristine part of the world. We showered and drank spring water, and, you know, by and large, lived a very clean life. I got into mushrooms through my mom and our family, mostly through culinary mushrooms, you know, like forging for the chandras and, you know, bleedies in the woods. And then through my passion for human performance and sports, I ended up with adaptogenic, functional mushrooms. Through that ventured in deeper into psychedelic mushrooms. And I think this was just an evolution, eventually to land here, as you go from ecosystem to ecosystem, and just thinking about the impact, the big aha moment for me was having my first child, Banyan, a little over four years ago, and just like changing diapers and realizing that they're like, the amount of disposable diapers that you go through is insane, and we did the whole cloth diaper thing, but also understood that that's not super sustainable either for Most families. So that was the big aha moment. And then lucky enough to meet people like you two and some other people that are much, much smarter than I am, and learn and really understand that potential in this field across multiple different applications. Speaker 1 4:38 So there's a plethora of xenotoxins in our environment, 100% from humans. We're pretty good at doing that. And what are currently like if you zoomed out and you looked at micromediation as a whole, what do you think are the biggest, top ticket issue, pollutants in our world? And. What are the current or lack of practices that we have to remediate them? Unknown Speaker 5:07 Tara, do you want to start, or should I do? Okay, sure. Speaker 3 5:09 Well, I can say that there are things that we currently don't have solutions for, you know, for air, and there are things that we cannot use fungi, at least we don't know yet, including some of the ocean plastics and things that potentially could work, because the these, some of these species do thrive in salt environments. But I'll let Daniel comment on what we can do. Speaker 2 5:37 Yeah, so what we can do is actually break down really recalcitrant, meaning really hard to break down, pollutants, stuff that sticks around for a long time. So any of the you know some of the Forever chemicals, or people might have heard of persistent organic pollutants. Organic just means that they're carbon based. And you know, a lot of decomposer fungi use carbon as their food source, right? So they can break down even complex polymers, such as those found in plastics and other petroleum based products that end up as pollutants. And so this is a lot better than the conventional way that we remediate or clean up pollution in the environment, or deal with hazardous waste and other waste by, you know, just essentially digging it up and dumping it somewhere else so or or containing it in some way. Yeah. So really, the exciting potential to work with fungi here is that instead of, you know, just moving the like pollution around and not really solving the problem, not really dealing with it, we can work with fungi to actually, you know, deal with the pollution in place so on site, whether that's a landfill or, you know, a former oil refinery or some or some other type of contaminated site. Speaker 1 7:18 So there's many different ways to remediate waste or deal with waste, I should say a lot of the more conventional or pretty fucked up. I mean, these like bury it or burn it. I mean, it doesn't really do anything or pour more chemicals on it. Then you get into bioremediation, which is pretty cool, I think, severely underfunded, depending on what country you're in, but use of bacteria, then plants like phytoremediation, then we get to mycoremediation. But with anything, there's pros and cons, right? So we I feel like I've heard this a lot. A lot of people in the mushroom space are wary of what I like to call the mushroom, or the Paul salmons effect, where you think, you know, mushrooms are this golden ticket that can save every single problem in our world. And that's just, I would love for that to be the case. But what are kind of the biggest pros, and then what are the cons for micromediation? Where? Where does it not work? Speaker 3 8:20 Yeah, well, the big promise and the big upside of mycoremediation, similar to phyto too, is that it's nature based. It nature healing nature. And because of historical evolutionary reasons, it actually works pretty well, and we can talk in detail why and how. But it is regenerative, so it does create, there's carbon locked in to, for example, these plastics or polymers, that then gets released also into the soil, and that can be leveraged by plants and create more life. You know, it's circle of life. That's the beautiful part. It is very cost effective. If you can get the emergence right and the conditions right, it spreads a lot, which, you know, also scares some people. They're like, Whoa, is this happening? But at the same time, it's already happening in some landfills, but on a smaller scale, maybe the most important reason why it's exciting for me personally is that there currently is no other option, like, truly, like there's no end of life option for these plastics and and we've now have more plastics in the world today already than all the weight of animals on land, and by 2050 we'll expect to have more plastics in oceans than we have fish. So it's pretty wild now. It is a newer field, and we can talk about the recent history, but talk about like 15 years. 10 years, maybe seriously, you mentioned that some of the stuff has been funded. Some has not. Luckily, there are very big universities now with teams doing something around this. But surely the petrochemical company. And regulatory barriers are massive, but I would say the biggest unlock or issue so far is that there hasn't been commercial applications or commercial solutions, so then you've relied on academia and funding that's been limited. So that's been the bottleneck on making huge progress here is having commercial applications. Allows for more funding, more research, faster progress. And and you're against the Giants, so to say, Speaker 1 10:33 and they have to admit that they did wrong, right the second there's a cleanup of toxic waste, it's like they're almost automatically guilty at that point. So it's like, yeah, yeah. Don't talk about it. Don't touch it. Don't go near that. Yeah, Speaker 3 10:47 for example, the diapers that are one of the less regulated industries, so not only they would have to admit that they're wrong, but there might be regulatory barriers for them. If this would people realize how big of an issue this is, and they don't want any regulation. They want to fly under the radar, so it's jeopardizing hundreds of billions of dollar profits, and just because, like, it flies under the radar, and people say it's a mandatory, essential item that sometimes get bought with food stamps, and they use all these guilt methods to hide the fact that there is currently no solution. And in the case of diapers, every disposable diaper ever created is in a landfill, and every baby creates 6000 more of those, and it's the number one household plastic waste item. But Speaker 1 11:38 thank God billion dollar corporations can't give donations to politicians to I mean, that was awful, right? That would make our process way harder, but way harder. Do you want to speak Danielle and some of the pros and cons of micro mediation? Speaker 2 11:58 Sure, yeah. I think taro did a good, great job of covering, covering most of them. I guess something I wanted to add in some of the cons of the conventional so if we just keep going with the status quo, is that there's actually a lot of greenhouse gas emissions created in obviously, the extraction of fossil fuels and then transforming them into stuff, like diapers, like, you know, plastics and whatnot. But then also in how they're disposed of, creates even more emissions as these, you know, wastes are, you know, trucked around and buried and whatnot. So a major advantage of more nature based methods such as Myco remediation is that you're reducing the emissions associated with like hauling around all that waste, and you're actually, you know, you know, breaking down really complex stuff back into its maybe healthier versions of carbon, healthier forms of carbon that can support healthy soils and support plant plant growth plants, of course, you know, sinking carbon, or, you know, taking in carbon dioxide. So, yeah, there's some, really, there's a whole bunch of other benefits to Myco remediation and other nature based approaches that you know aren't always part of the picture, but become really stark when you compare with like the status quo. Speaker 1 13:36 So who have been some of your biggest inspirations in the micromediation field. And I should say, Who slash what? Because it could be a specific species of fungi that you're like, Oh, my God, they kill it, or a specific person or group, or university, a technology, maybe a paper that you love, or a book, yeah, what? Are your biggest inspirations in that field? Speaker 2 14:06 Sure, so I was really inspired by and have received mentorship from Dr Mia Maltz, who's part of CO renewal, as well as Mike and Edie Allen, who were are now professors emeritus at UC Riverside, and taught me so much of what I know about fungal ecology and more. And then I also want to shout out to and acknowledge a few amazing papers and experts we've had the privilege of bringing in to hero to train us in some of their methods. So Dr ting zoo at UC Berkeley, and Dr John picorski at UC San Diego both put out honestly, kind of revolutionary papers in nature about for ting zoo, it was embedded enzymes for plastics degradation and for um. Dr pikorsky, it was embedded spores for plastic degradation at a at an academic kind of research scale, like a lab scale, but definitely worth checking out those papers and all of those groups and people Unknown Speaker 15:15 that's awesome, cool. Speaker 3 15:18 And for me, I got into it originally through Paul Stamets, like many others, I was a little disheartened to find out that the so such a good TED Talk ended up being is that the research was actually inconclusive. But oyster mushrooms, you're like, Oh, they're gonna save the world, plus they're yum, yum, they're medicinal and all that stuff. And then Alex, your book, and some of you know, like those tests, there was, like, there was a lot of cool grassroots folks that I met along the ways. But if I would have to summarize, the biggest inspiration is just trees. And our family has big history with just, you know, forest I'm a little bit of a forest creature, so just the that whole natural process is a big inspiration. Lera 16:09 Have you seen this total sidetrack, but have you seen those memes online that show, like, a picture of, like beautiful Finland or Norway, of this, like, beautiful scenery, and it's like, this would look so perfect if it had, like a Walmart mega center here, like a park, Speaker 3 16:25 yeah? Like anything, no matter how thin you slice this, there's two sides, and depending when you visit Finland, you might see the other side of Finland, including during Hockey World Championships, when grown men that are not in great physical shape will get naked in the city and swim in the ponds to celebrate whatever they celebrating. So, Speaker 1 16:46 I mean, it's a lot better than flipping cars and, you know, fights and stuff. Fair fights, bath Wim Hof, there you go. They're biohacking to celebrate. That's great. So, so moving towards, you know, we talk about the the overall micro mediation field, but honing in on hero specifically. What is the origin story of hero? I know Taro, you said, really the birth of your first kid, and seeing how many diapers are you're you're blowing through and wanting to come up with a solution, but you guys just officially launched, but you've been in secret agent mode for many years. What has been the origin story to now? Speaker 3 17:31 Yeah, hero is the brainchild of my co founder, Mickey Agarwal, who invented, among many other things, the first periodic underwear about six years ago, before we joined forces. She was having, like a thinking day and thinking about, you know, how plastic sucks, and her son, named hero, H, I, R, O, came and brought this book called Pacha Mama, which is this, like environmental kids book that I also read to my kids. It's awesome. And in that book, it says there are certain mushrooms that can eat plastics. And then she went and talked to a bunch of leading experts around the world, some of our mutual friends as well, and interviewed them and tried to make this happen. Everyone was stoked, but it wouldn't go anywhere until we reconnected in 2020 we'd known each other for almost a decade through mutual friends, but then both moved to Austin, Texas at the same time. She was like, You got to help me figure this out. And I was like, Oh, I'm pretty busy. But since soon after that, we had our first kit, like, few months later, and I realized that, like, I need to do this, not for myself, but for the planet and the world. And if it means moonlighting some late nights and extra hours, then it's worth it. So that's where we came. So for four years, we brought in some of the leading experts, like Danielle said and her included, hired amazing engineers, chemists to for us to figure this out, and we are now proud to launch like the first version to the world this year. But there's along the way, we've learned so much, and there's so many applications and possibilities that we could further improve upon. Speaker 1 19:23 So let's start with what's currently out there. The first group is kind of the traditional diapers that are made of, I'm guessing, a bunch of different types of plastic. And you know, once it's used and thrown into the landfill, what? What types of different materials or toxins. Do we have to break down then? And then, let's talk about maybe some of the different eco solutions out there, and where they fall short. Speaker 3 19:53 Yeah, I can start, and then Danielle can fill on. So this was a combination of two things. One. We, Mickey and I scratched our own itch with having to use diapers and try and cloth and then, at the same time, happens to be that this is a huge problem, like I mentioned. It's the number one household plastic waste item. Funny enough, adult diapers are now past the plastic waste of baby diapers, which is a scary fact with yeah, there's less units, but they are lots bigger, so there's more plastics. And if we talk about basically disposable diapers, every one of those is in a landfill. We create more to circle the Earth few 100 times every year, and there are zero biodegradable diapers. There is all of the quote, unquote eco diapers are green washing, and we can talk how, and there's bunch of examples how they call bamboo. But then it's actually worse, and using these PLA kind of plant based materials that take yield from food production, but also create even more micro plastics and perform worse on the baby, creating more more rashes and blowouts and all these stuff. But what's really cool is that while it's these diapers are made out of depending on the diaper, about usually five to eight different types of polymers. But what's cool is that those polymers also make, like 70% of the plastics we use. So if we can solve this one big problem, it is kind of an Archimedes lever for polyethylene, polypropylene and so many different types of particularly soft plastics, consumer products that are are the harder ones to break down. So Daniella, if you want to add any, yeah, Speaker 2 21:48 and just to add in onto that about how hard it is to break down diapers. So diapers are composed, yeah, because they're composed of these multiple types of plastics, that means that they don't really have a good reuse application, because they're this mix of like so many different types of plastics. Each of those is very hard to break down on its own. It's very complex polymer, right? And then you have them all together, and then they're kind of sealed together with these pretty toxic adhesive. So glues at high temperatures. And then there's, of course, like pee and poo in the plastic. So there's, like, a total mix of all these different types of things that are already hard to break down individually. And then you mix them all together, add some toxic glue and additives, and then you put those in a landfill. And landfills are really challenging environments for degradation. I mean, they're known to be tombs for waste because they're so hot and there isn't oxygen, which most living organisms need to grow, and they're dry, you know. So this is a really, really challenging first sort of problem to work on, right? Because it's made of all these different types of plastics, and then because of where diapers end up as well. Speaker 1 23:17 So I know I actually didn't put this in the question document, but I think it's important to ask, what makes fungi so unique in terms of micro remediation, is they're able to handle a bunch of different toxins all kind of using the same way or ability. And so I would love for you to touch on that. And what makes fungi unique in tackling many different toxins all at once, if that makes sense, Speaker 3 23:50 yeah, I can give the lame and low brow version, and then Danielle can give the higher brow version. So as probably listeners of this pod, know fungi did definitely. Were one of the first organisms to come on the dry land and their extrema fields. And they had to eat all kinds of things, eating quotation marks, and they needed an external food source. And there was a point in the planet when plants were introduced and trees started growing, where suddenly the earth was full of trees that are dead, basically, but there was nothing to break them down because of this lignin structure in them that was really hard for nature to process, because evolution hadn't caught up at that point, right? So what did these fungi figure out is they figure out a way to break down that lignin and the carbon backbone of lignin is very similar to carbon backbone of polymers. That makes sense, because at the end of the day, these are made out of petrol, these petrochemical products are made out of oil. Oil is dead trees and dead dinosaurs and whatnot. So it makes sense. I. Um, but they got used to it. And because they've gotten used to a lot of things over the last two plus billion years, temperatures, oxygen, depending on the species, they can just survive in so many conditions and find a food source and quickly adopt their enzymes to meet the needs again, depending on temperature and materials and oxygen and other compo competition too, they somehow figure out a way to navigate the maze. But I know Danielle can say it more beautifully than I can. Speaker 2 25:39 No, that was great. Yeah, that's That's exactly it. Fungi are you sort of uniquely suited to remediation of really complex organic contaminants because of those enzymes that they put out that can work on multiple types of really complex organic contaminants at once. So it doesn't have to be, you know, it, yeah, these enzymes, yeah, can, can sort of break down a whole bunch of really complex stuff. And they're, they're so adaptive, like Tara mentioned that the fungi can constantly be sort of like concocting, you know, interacting with its environment and trying to find food, and then concocting enzymes that will specifically target that substrate for them. Speaker 3 26:37 And if I may add one thing which is cool when we talk about the pros, is that waste and human waste products is constantly changing. So if we look at the last 510, years, we constantly invent. Even if we talk about polyethylene, there's so many kinds of polyethylene, they get innovated so quickly. So what's really cool is that they're not just with plastics, but in general, fungi have been able to within the same species, within generations, adapt to those conditions, which just means that in a very short time period, in some cases, their children and grandchildren, great grandchildren, are more adapted to the plastic diet. So and we mimic this many times in our labs and in our field test, but you can really teach them to get really good at it. And what's cool is that if the conditions change over years and decades, they will adapt that to that too. So there are a lot more intelligent form of environmental action than what humans can do, because they're constant learning and changing and getting better. Lera 27:45 Yeah, I, you know, I'm a huge proponent of extremophile organisms. And, you know, we, I'm sure there's some listeners on here that are pretty new to mycology, and they hear the term eating plastic, and maybe they picture like a mushroom with a mouth just chomping away at a diaper or something. So I wanted you know we brought up the term enzymes. Maybe there's some listeners that don't know what that is, but maybe paint like a very layman's term image of what is actually happening with these quote, unquote enzymes. And what does this quote, unquote eating process look like? If that makes sense, Unknown Speaker 28:25 want me to take that. Are you Speaker 2 28:28 sure you're good at the layman's terms? Yeah, I am. Speaker 3 28:32 It's when you're dumb you can explain things in a typical way. So yeah, they don't have a mouth or stomach, but they do need an external food source. So imagine that their food is pizza. Because we like pizza or burger or lasagna, choose whatever food you want. But instead of eating the lasagna, you would spit on it. But you would not just spit one thing. You would spit like five things that together. These are the enzymes create a chemical cocktail that starts digesting that lasagna or pizza, and then you can go and use the metabolites of that enzyme breaking down process for your energy and life, basically. So, yeah, it's an external digested process made with enzymes. Think of your saliva to help break down. Whatever thing they do. Speaker 1 29:27 So your mushrooms are spitting on your diapers, breaking them down. Yeah, the other thing, yeah, the other Speaker 2 29:35 thing they're doing too, is they're like crawling. They're they're crawling on top of the lasagna or the diaper, and actually wanted to shout out to Jay Schindler, who taught me a lot about micro remediation way back in the day. Jay Schindler fungi for the people. But yeah, he had this really cute quote, yeah, he taught us this in simple terms by saying, you know, humans live in houses and eat pizza. For fungi. Their pizza is their house, so they they kind of live in and grow through what they're eating, and then, like, yeah, spit out those, those enzymes which help break down their food outside of themselves, where they can then take in the the energy, the nutrients that they need. Speaker 1 30:18 Awesome, yeah, that's a great, great analogy. You talked a little bit about how I don't know if you want to dive deeper into the current kind of sustainable options, like I did a quick Google search. I saw some, I won't shout out any companies, but it seemed like bamboo was a big one, many different companies saying, hey, are diapers made out of bamboo. What my guess is, and correct me, if I'm wrong, is maybe just a tiny part of it is made out of bamboo, like 1% and they're like, Oh yeah, we're so eco friendly. And is that true? Or where did they kind of fall short? Speaker 3 30:57 Yeah. So the diapers have existed increasingly, since the 60s, since the 80s, it's been dominated by two companies, Kimberly Clark, P and G with pempers and Huggies. And those products cover close to like 80% of the market. And why a lot of these upstart brands have not been able to penetrate despise the very environmentally not friendly options is that those products are made from alternative materials. Those alternative materials are a, expensive, B, they perform worse performance here, meaning absorption of pee and poop and just for the baby and the parent. And maybe more importantly, they actually are not doing what they're saying. They're doing. They're they've been sold as like various equal products, but to your point, about third of the product is this SAP, this sodium based plastic, for lack of a better word, that absorbs that water or pee really hard. So if you ever have a baby and you put them in a pool or somewhere, and suddenly the diaper is like 10 times the size, because that's how effective it is. And if you use things like bamboo, you're not really using bamboo, like we think of bamboo, but it's this bamboo viscose. Or if you're using plant based materials, you're using this corn based plastic still. So it's by large green washing. And sure, maybe if a traditional diaper breaks down in 400 years, and yours breaks down in 100 or 200 years, it's still 100 to 200 years. And we don't know, obviously, so that's a problem. And sadly, sadly, those eco diapers are kind of worst of all worlds, because they're bad for the clown head, they're bad for the baby and they're bad for the parent, as in, also expensive. So you know, if I would say, if we wouldn't exist, I would probably tell you to go and buy some diapers at Costco, because that's that's probably as good, or a better choice than those expensive, trendy diapers. Speaker 1 33:09 So this is a really big, controversial issue, and there's, I think, many sides to this discussion. You know, I've talked to some people in the plastic degradation space, and their opinion is, like, you know, when, when they're big chunks of plastic, they're not really a problem. It's when they start to break down that's actually the problem, because you're creating microplastics. And currently, and you know, maybe there's a paper that just was released yesterday, that I don't know about, but currently there's not conclusive data on how microplastics affect humans. You know, we could use our intuition, and probably they're most definitely bad, but, you know, at this point we there's a general consensus that microplastics are pretty bad, not just for humans, but But you know, marine life and things like that. Lera 34:09 So, so the idea is, some people argue that, you know, if you don't do micro mediation of plastics, right, you're actually creating the problem faster of creating more micro plastics. So I just wanted to ask you your opinion on that. Any thoughts around containing microplastics or Yeah. How do you go about that thought process? Speaker 2 34:34 Yeah, so I guess first of all, diapers end up in landfills which are contained they're supposed to be contained environments. So if there is leaching from landfills, that's a problem that's outside the scope of what we work on, right? That's a becomes regulatory issue. Yeah, and, like you sort of alluded to microplastics. Six would result from an incomplete Myco digestion, right? So you can design for complete, complete degradation, right? But of course, like, yeah, as these enzymes, and we've, we've seen this, and we've tested for this, for like, firsthand in our experiments. So yeah, when you first inoculate a diaper right with you, add in those fungi, what the those enzymes are going to get to work, and they're going to start to break apart this big thing into smaller things, smaller pieces, and that process will continue, right? The fungus has no reason to stop eating until it's out of food, right? So as long as we've designed, we've done our job properly, yeah, those plastics, the those plastics, will be broken down into smaller bits. They're also going to be held within the the weave of the fungal mycelium, right? That living, like I said, the fungus crawls on top and grows all through its food into, like this really elaborate web of mycelium. It's not going to let go of of its food, right? It's, it's sort of grown all through the diaper. So as it's eating and those little micro plastics are being created, those little chunks of plastic, it'll then eat those, as long as the process is able to continue. And even again, in a worst case scenario where, you know, maybe because of really harsh conditions in a landfill, there wasn't a complete breakdown of all the plastics in the diaper, they should be contained within the landfill. And at the same time again, in nature, what we would see actually, is that as soon as there are less complex, so more simple and smaller bits of plastics, now probably there's a lot more that can eat them or can go to work on them. So I think it's sort of a Yeah. And again, as an environmental toxicologist, there actually was a study I saw last week that just came out. It's the first study that found a an adverse health effect from micro plastics. But yes, there actually isn't much. You know, there isn't, yeah. So the real issue there is, like, we got to match the exposure to So again, our our products end up in landfills where they're contained. You know, the micro plastic issue is more of a concern in drinking water and in the waters of the world. So Speaker 3 37:48 yeah. And to build upon that, when I started for Sigmatic, the world of functional mushrooms was very different as well. And back then, I guess now, as well, some people see glass half full and some see it half empty. And both can be true, right? I just like the idea of half full. And in that time, a lot of people told me that, well, there's no evidence that Reishi works, or Lion's Mane works. There's not enough human studies, or there's one human study from Japan on a small sample size. And I was like, well, first principles, they've been used for 2000 years for healing around the world, so, but you need a study. Same thing is like it was said, is a novel food, it could be harmful for our bodies. European Union, Ban Chaga, even though chocolate is used hundreds of years by Cordyceps too. Yeah, yeah, cordyceps too. And it's and then a lot of people, including a lot of mushroom people in the US, attacked us, saying, it's not sustainable, because you're, you know, getting Turkey Tail and Chaga in the wild and, you know, and there's been all these waves, but usually people laugh at you first, but then they really love to resist you. And this is, I think, one of the issues we're just going to face. And and for me, the important part is, like the current solution there is not basically, and then even if the microplastic process to Daniel's Point that it's incomplete digestion right now, let's say the diaper takes 400 years. Let's take 200 years to break down. So for what 199 of those years, there will be micro plastics, and in our case, whatever, depending on the conditions, this is six months a year, two years, it will break down. That makes the time when those micro plastics are round a lot shorter. But Daniel made a great point about the landfill and the mycelium web kind of covering it, yeah, Speaker 2 39:46 and I want to point it back to to the plastic producers. I think if people are concerned about micro plastics, you should be concerned about plastics really at all, because, like, like Tara. Said, anytime a plastic is produced, it will produce micro plastics as it breaks down, whether through environmental factors like the sunlight, where you know salt water, or through biological action. So Speaker 1 40:16 So Tara, I know you have to go pretty soon. We have a few more questions. Let's maybe speed round the rest of it. I wish we had more time. But let's go into hero. I know you have two products, so one is the solution, the mushroom solution, and one is a whole new diaper. Maybe you have come up with more since Museum of ice cream. But, yeah, let's, let's talk about those two different options and and if, if I had a kid and I wanted to find a solution through hero, what? What would that look like? Speaker 3 40:54 Yeah, really briefly, the options long term are endless, but you have to start somewhere. So we're starting with the diaper as the leading cause. And I also hope that parents and young parents will be a voice of change. That being said, a lot of there's a lot of mycophobia, and I know this intimately through Four Sigmatic a lot of people are scared of it and and they be such a sacred thing. You know me having young kids, I understand. So we were going to put the technology inside the diaper, but then consumers were like, afraid of like, if it touches the baby, even though these are completely safe. So right now, the technology is separate a little pouch that you put after the baby pees or poop. So you have regular diaper. The baby does its thing, then you remove it and change it, and same time as you put a wipe or whatever, you throw in a little pouch, almost like a laundry sheet in there, that will activate from the key and poop, and those darn dormant fungi species will wake up and get to work, but By the time they get to work, it's already in the landfill, probably, unless you leap trash out of your house for a long time, Speaker 1 42:11 and can and can you watch it grow or, yeah, so ideally, you're just throwing it away as soon as they can get to the landfill, the better, right? We Speaker 3 42:19 thought of this problem a lot, and it's a funny one, because, like, we really want you to see it, because it is such a mind blowing thing to see grow that being said, we're talking about poop and diapers and they're smelly, right? So people barely keep it for a few days. That's why we actually did a Kickstarter for this plastic decomposing kit with a little window where you can put just shredded plastics and the technology and see grow in your window, still no poop and pee in it, so it doesn't get smelly. So, but that's more of like us to just show to people that it works. That's, you know, not people are not going to pay long. You'll do it once, but you're not going to do it probably twice. So it's just the one off thing that we're doing to illustrate how it works. But, yeah. I mean, we hope people do different experiments, but pee and poop are, poop is pretty toxic, actually, so it there's a reason why not to keep it out of your house for a long time or buried in your backyard. Lera 43:16 Yeah. I mean, especially if you take a bunch of pharmaceuticals that just pass right through both. I mean, yeah, there's tons of pharmaceuticals that just pass right Speaker 3 43:26 through also in water. So even if you drink spring water, if you shower and there's steam and you're breathing through it, there's so many ways how you can actually ingest these things now, which is kind of crazy. Speaker 1 43:38 So and maybe a sentence, what, what do you feel like has been the hardest part of creating hero and tackling these solutions? And then on the flip side, what do you think has been the most rewarding? Unknown Speaker 43:56 Daniel, you start Speaker 2 43:59 the hardest part is going from understanding that a fungal species can grow on a plastic to, you know, developing a scaled up, you Know, fungal inoculum that can reliably, you know, grow in dirty diapers in landfill conditions. So, yeah, a lot of people get excited when the new fungus is discovered that eats plastic, but I say she the jump from identifying a fungus that will grow on plastic to actually that being implemented to clean up plastic in the world is a lot bigger than I think most people realize, from the lab to the real world. Speaker 3 44:48 Yeah, and to build upon that, it's always fun to get, like a PR hit that they discovered a species that does this, and it actually doesn't mean anything in the real world. Nobody's done what? We've done at hero we hope to inspire a lot of people to do more of this stuff. But it when you do frontier research, there is no processes, there's no road maps, hiring people like you have to bring in this oceans, 11 of random experts of different things and create like a mosaic, uh, of talent. There's no critical biomass. There's so many different kind of plastics you have to make themselves stable. So I hate this anecdote, but it's the best I have. Is like I imagine when Tesla cars were created and they didn't have supply chain for the batteries, and they had to figure out so many things, from manufacturing to design, and we feel very similar is like, there's so many things where there was no blueprint and we had to call random experts of completely outside of, you know, Myco digestion field, to come up and give us a little nugget that we can apply to what we're doing. So, yeah, Frontier research is really hard, and so many people are starting apps and all kinds of businesses, but like doing actual science and trying to commercialize, it is is freaking hard. It Speaker 1 46:11 is hard. And I think that's what makes it so rewarding, is when you finally figure it out, and you have this Jerry rinked machine, or whatever it is or process, and you're like, we, we fucking did it, you know. And there's no rule book. There's no like, I can't google this, you know. And that's cool. That's cool to to use your collective brains and all your different skills to figure out a complex problem. I have a couple more questions, but we only have two, two minutes. So, where can people follow hero? Because I'm sure you guys are about to blow up. You have a lot more things to release and work on and and so two part, where can people follow your work? And do you have any exciting events, you know, future things that you want to shout out, Speaker 3 47:04 yeah, and the company is called Hero technologies. You can find us on LinkedIn and Instagram right now, and the website will be hero H, I, R, O, diapers.com and that will be launched very soon, and exciting things is, we're already working on the second generation, and we're working on like landfill simulations and working on million things. The science is fun because, like, you work on it now, and you hopefully will have a peer reviewed published article in a, you know, 12 to 18 months or something like that out, but like it's slow, like it's not overnight, because there's a lot of keys to cross and eyes to dot. Speaker 1 47:51 Amazing. I wish we had more time, but yeah, I guess we'll have to bring you on in a year or two to talk about phase 30 of all your exciting adventures, but thank you so much for coming on. Plastic degradation is a massive thing that I think a lot of people are really curious about, and it's cool that you're coming up with real world solutions, and not just a PR stunt and and coming up with solutions that that more people can can work on and have inspiration to tackle some of the world's biggest pollutants. So thank you. Hats off to you guys, and thank you for everyone for tuning in and streaming in for another episode of the mushroom revival podcast. We couldn't do without you. Lera 48:36 Yeah. Much love to every one of you. If you want to support the show, we don't have a direct Patreon or any way to support directly. But we do have a mother brand mushroom revival, where you can find some organic, functional mushroom supplements. We do have a QR code, or, I mean, a special coupon code just for listeners of the podcast, that is pod treat. And we have a bunch of free resources on our website, from blog posts to ebooks that you can download. Speaker 1 49:05 Also my newest book, The Little Book of mushrooms, is on there as well, and as always, mush love and may the spores be we. Unknown Speaker 49:13 Hub. Transcribed by https://otter.ai
