Eben Bayer (left) and Gavin McIntyre founded Ecovative in 2007.
This is the ninth profile in our series on American design entrepreneurs, looking at how they got where they are, what they do all day, and what advice they have for other designers running their own businesses. Read last week’s profile here.
In June, the Green Island, New York company Ecovative “grew” a house. From mushrooms. This is just the latest radical experiment from the materials-production outfit known for using mycelium—or the roots of mushrooms—to create biomaterials for everyday applications like wall insulation and packaging. For the aforementioned house, the company filled the pine tongue-and-groove walls of a 60-square-foot structure with its fire-resistant, environmentally-friendly Mushroom Insulation. “That house is still alive,” says Ecovative’s 28-year-old co-founder Eben Bayer. “If you were to cut a hole in the wall to run wiring, for example, the material would be dry. If you spritzed it with water, it would grow back and close in around the wiring.”
The idea to grow home-compostable bioplastics from living materials began in 2007 at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute (RPI), when Bayer and fellow student Gavin McIntyre first used mycelium to create a rigid, moldable material. With the encouragement of a professor, Bayer and McIntyre founded Ecovative out of RPI’s Business Incubator—which turned out to be a valuable resource for the budding entrepreneurs. “Depending on the one you’re in, [business incubators] can provide a lot of services like networking and coaching,” Bayer says. “But the thing that RPI did for us that was life-changing was that for the first six months they gave us free office space.”
Bayer says that they also benefitted from being left alone. “What we really needed was a wet lab,” Bayer says. “Trying to do biology with carpeting is not easy. We put up walls so people wouldn’t know what we were doing, and there was steam coming out from under our door. They ignored us.”
Eben Bayer with a sheet of Ecovative’s Mushroom Insulation
Mushroom Packaging used for wine shipping
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