Cultivating mushrooms produces a lot of waste. For every kilogram of mushrooms produced, about three kilograms of soil-like material containing straw, manure and peat is left behind. In the EU, this results in more than 3 billion kilograms of waste per year.

Managing this waste is a challenge. Although it is rich in organic matter, and therefore useful as compost, used mushroom substrate – the soil-like material – contains a lot of water, which makes it heavy and unprofitable to transport. Some of it is used as compost in agricultural land close by but the vast majority that remains ends up being stored temporarily then landfilled.

‘Every year we have more and more waste,’ said Pablo Martinez, project manager at the Mushroom Technological Research Center of La Rioja in Spain. ‘So, we need larger and larger areas just to manage this waste.’

More mushroom waste could soon be given a second life though thanks to new innovations. Dr Bart van der Burg, Director of Innovation at BioDetection Systems in Amsterdam, the Netherlands, and his team are interested in discarded mushroom parts, such as stems, and deformed mushrooms, which are part of the cultivation leftovers. They are aiming to extract components such as proteins, carbohydrates, fats and chitin – a fibrous substance – from them as part of the Funguschain project. Their goal is to incorporate these extracts into new products such as novel foods, cosmetics and bioplastics. ‘I think we will end up with at least three products coming out of this project,’ said Dr van der Burg.

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This article was originally published in Horizon, the EU Research and Innovation magazine and written by Sandrine Ceurstemont.

Imagine being able to sustainably produce a nutritious and delicious food product that is not constrained by specific environmental conditions required to support a predominately plant-based agricultural industry.

Kennesaw State University researcher Christopher Cornelison is exploring the possibilities of improving the food supply chain by leveraging innovative technology to expand the opportunities for mushroom production in Georgia.

“We must be able to develop sustainable methods for producing readily preserved and nutritious foods without regional climactic limitations,” said Cornelison, an assistant professor of microbiology in the College of Science and Mathematics and director of the BioInnovation Laboratory at KSU. “Mushrooms are an ideal crop as they only rely on three environmental factors that can be regulated to optimize growth yield—humidity, temperature and carbon dioxide concentrations.”
Although sales of these spore-bearing fruiting bodies of fungi accounted for more than $3.1 billion in U.S. economic impact according to a 2019 American Mushroom Institute report, they are still underutilized.

Cornelison said more than half of the nation’s mushroom production is associated with a single county in Pennsylvania. The substrate used in this production, primarily mulch, is transported from the Midwest to meet the demand.

That is why Cornelison is now focused on determining the feasibility of growing culinary and commodity mushrooms in Georgia via low-cost and efficient production systems housed in modified shipping containers with embedded environmental control systems.

With a new $25,000 award from the venture development program of the Georgia Research Alliance (GRA), Cornelison’s goal is to study the potential commercialization of growing these mushrooms on media or substrates of regional agricultural wastes such as peanut shells, corn chaff or spent brewing grains.

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