The Origin Story

While working in my family business, doing the day to day tasks, growing the business and working hard to continue its expansion, I was shocked at the amount of sawdust we produced and how we had no good economic value for it, other than burning it for heat. 

This was grand during the winter months, but come the summer when the workshop was already hot, the problem quickly became apparent. We were roasted in the workshop trying to keep the sawdust at a moderate level and that was when I decided that something needed to be done.

After a lot of head scratching and prototyping, I finally landed on the idea of making sustainable homeware using a new material from the sawdust, with mycelium as the binding agent.

While an epoxy resin would have been the easier solution for joining this sawdust together, I wanted it to be as environmentally friendly as possible, being a big believer in the circular economy. This is where the mycelium came in.

Mycelium, which is the root structure of mushrooms, forms an incredibly intricate web like structure to extract nutrients and feed itself in order to produce the fruiting bodies (which would traditionally be referred to as mushrooms), where it then produces its spores allowing it to reproduce. We allow it to form the root like structure around our sawdust in moulds, but then kill it off with heat to stop the growth before it gets to the fruiting body stage. This allows us to use the mycelium as a binding agent, without the extra complexity involved in bringing it to fruit. 

We use a Reishi mushroom mycelium that is ideally suited for growing on hardwood sawdust.