At the Fortune Brainstorm Green conference yesterday, Dell unveiled a new type of protective packaging, grown from mushrooms. That’s right, said packaging is grown, and from mushrooms at that. After building the molds, Dell fills them with cotton hulls (waste created by the cotton gin), injects the molds with mushroom spawn that feeds off the carbohydrates and sugars in the cotton husks, sustaining the spawn until it grows to fill the mold. The sample shown has about the same durability and weight of styrofoam packaging. The point of such packaging is that only recycled energy is required to power the manufacturing process, thus reducing overall energy requirements. Dell will be starting a trial program to test the viability of their fungus packaging.
(Dell via Fortune Tech via Engadget)
