Transforming textile waste into materials using fungi

Textile waste from ‘fast fashion’ has considerable environmental impact and is an EU priority area. Colonising textiles with fungi provides a unique solution, with options to bond them together to create composite materials, fruit them to provide mushrooms (source of chitin-glucan complex), or both. We produced mycelium-textile composites in analogy to traditional prepreg-based composite manufacturing, consolidating multiple textile stacks colonised with Ganoderma lucidum into a single material of customisable thickness and free-form geometry. An oxygen gradient existed through the cross-section of textile stacks, resulting in more growth on surface than core plies. Consolidated composites comprising only surface layers achieved tensile strengths up to ~14 MPa. Their flexural and shear strengths (7 MPa and 0.5 MPa, respectively) indicated suitability for semi-structural construction applications. Waste textile substrate could also be fruited (5.7% w/w yield). These advances expand the stalled application of mycelium composites and provide a nature-based solution to textile upcycling.