Mycelium skins function as sustainable substrates for high-performance electronic devices and batteries for a green future.
Electronic devices are irrevocably integrated into our lives. Yet, their limited lifetime and often improvident disposal demands sustainable concepts to realize a green electronic future. Research must shift its focus on substituting nondegradable and difficult-to-recycle materials to allow either biodegradation or facile recycling of electronic devices. Here, we demonstrate a concept for growth and processing of fungal mycelium skins as biodegradable substrate material for sustainable electronics. The skins allow common electronic processing techniques including physical vapor deposition and laser patterning for electronic traces with conductivities as high as 9.75 ± 1.44 × 104 S cm−1. The conformal and flexible electronic mycelium skins withstand more than 2000 bending cycles and can be folded several times with only moderate resistance increase. We demonstrate mycelium batteries with capacities as high as ~3.8 mAh cm−2 used to power autonomous sensing devices including a Bluetooth module and humidity and proximity sensor.
I understood this: They built a sensor board on which they replaced the board, a part of the battery and a part of a sensor with mycelium, making a big part of the device biodegradable.
I just lit up a 20-year-old piece of gear to save the day on a remote site with no decent access.
Is mushroom electronics gonna last that long?
The text mentions this to be as a replacement in short-lived electronics with the goals of being easy to disassemble and biodegradable.
Opinion (shooting from the hip here, may be off the mark) - mycelium was used to replace glass fiber epoxy.
In the research paper, I see among other items a copper- or gold-plated antenna constructed on a sheet of mycelium, and it falling apart over time (11 days).
As a result, this seems to me like a technology to use if you must spew disposable ciruitcs in nature and want them to maximally degrade. Definitely not the tech to use for things that must work 20 years.
I’m wracking my insomniac brain trying to come up with something so ephemeral it suits a fortnight of life. Shark tags? I’m not sure whether Fast Fashion meeting e-waste is a net gain … In e-waste.
My mind went to sounding balloons electronics. Launched multiple times a day from multiple locations, land pretty much wherever, often recovered by amateurs but often not. Electronics are not the worst environmental offender on those payloads (batteries, Styrofoam case…) but it checks the tickboxes of short lived electronics.
Foundational research on a topic does not help you, directly, no. It just lays foundations for more science later.