Magical Mushroom Company
Eliminating waste and carbon through mushroom packaging
Every year, 141 million tons of plastic are produced for packaging globally. That is the same as the weight of 21,692,307 African Bush Elephants, which is approximately 55x the remaining population of African Bush Elephants. This amount of plastic contributes to significant pollution with about one-third never reaching proper collection systems. Its production, use, and disposal also generates approximately 1.8 billion tons of carbon emissions.
But this article doesn’t have anything to do with elephants. It has to do with mushrooms. The Magical Mushroom Company is working to eliminate this waste, both physical and carbon, through its Mushroom Packaging, created from, you guessed it, mushrooms.
Plastic is created through the extraction, refining, and manufacturing of fossil fuels. These processes, as the assembly of specific products, are energy-intensive, leading to significant emissions of CO2. Due to population growth, convenience, cost, and especially the rise of e-commerce, approximately half of all plastics ever produced have been in the last 15 years, with projections of a 2-3x increase or between 902 Mt and 1124 Mt by 2050.
Replacing plastic packaging with new, innovatively engineered materials can meet demand while eliminating the negative impacts. This is crucial in the efforts to conserve resources, energy, and reduce emissions, not to mention pollution. One material that is being explored is Mycelium.
Mycelium is made up of mushroom roots, which form a massive underground network of strong threads. It is cheap to grow, lightweight, and highly moldable, making it an attractive alternative to plastic.
One company working on using Mycelium for packaging is Magic Mushroom Company. They are focused on home-compostable alternatives to plastic foams, producing products by combining Mycelium with agricultural waste, including hemp, cork, and sawdust. The Mycelium itself acts as the binding agent, due to the Chitin polymer of which it is composed, so the ingredients can be heated into a material which is dried over the course of 6 days and is ready for use. This Chitin also makes the material naturally water and flame resistant.
Through this process, their material does not sacrifice performance quality. As they say on their website, “Our packaging performs just as well as polystyrene, avoids the new plastic packaging tax, and it is cost competitive with conventional foamed polymers. Our product meets the highest environmental standards for sustainability that your customers increasingly demand.”
The material is biodegradable, but can also be broken down by bacteria in the absence of oxygen. If broken into small pieces, this specific material, and its carbon, can return safely to the soil in 45 days. This is a sustainable option without sacrificing performance. The current scale, as stated on the company website, is in the multi-millions in terms of pieces of Mushroom® Packaging produced in the past 4 years. This has effectively removed thousands of tonnes of polystyrene foam packaging from landfills. In 2025, they are projecting the production of 10 million pieces, which would equate to the removal of tens of thousands more tonnes.
The private, UK-based company, which has raised $3.71 million from 5 investors in its seed round, knows that while material innovation is a powerful step forward to the evolution away from plastic packaging, there is much more driving this effort. The company leads with the belief that the technology is 10% of the solution, while the other 90% is process and production to ensure quality and cost-effectiveness to reach market scale.
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