{"id":158685,"date":"2025-02-27T07:26:00","date_gmt":"2025-02-27T06:26:00","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/renewable-carbon.eu\/news\/?p=158685"},"modified":"2025-02-21T17:04:03","modified_gmt":"2025-02-21T16:04:03","slug":"coffee-grounds-and-reishi-mushroom-spores-can-be-3d-printed-into-a-compostable-alternative-to-plastics","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/renewable-carbon.eu\/news\/coffee-grounds-and-reishi-mushroom-spores-can-be-3d-printed-into-a-compostable-alternative-to-plastics\/","title":{"rendered":"Coffee grounds and Reishi mushroom spores can be 3D printed into a compostable alternative to plastics\u00a0"},"content":{"rendered":"\n\n
\n
\"The
The packing material around this small glass was 3D printed from used coffee grounds. A white mycelium (sort of a root system for mushrooms) grows on the outside, which turns the grounds into a compostable alternative to Styrofoam.
\u00a9 Luo et al.\/3D Printing and Additive Manufacturing<\/figcaption><\/figure><\/div>\n\n\n

Only 30% of a coffee bean is soluble in water, and many brewing methods aim to extract significantly less than that. So of the 1.6 billion pounds of coffee<\/a> Americans consume in a year, more than 1.1 billion pounds of grounds are knocked from filters into compost bins and garbage cans.<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n

While watching the grounds from her own espresso machine accumulate, Danli Luo<\/a>, a University of Washington doctoral student in human centered design and engineering, saw an opportunity. Coffee is nutrient-rich and sterilized during brewing, so it\u2019s ideal for growing fungus, which, before it sprouts into mushrooms, forms a \u201cmycelial skin.\u201d This skin, a sort of white root system, can bind loose substances together and create a tough, water-resistant, lightweight material.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Luo and a UW team developed a new system for turning those coffee grounds into a paste, which they use to 3D print objects: packing materials, pieces of a vase, a small statue. They inoculate the paste with Reishi mushroom spores, which grow on the objects to form that mycelial skin. The skin turns the coffee grounds \u2014 even when formed into complex shapes \u2014 into a resilient, fully compostable alternative to plastics. For intricate designs, the mycelium fuses separately printed pieces together to form a single object.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

The team published its findings<\/a> Jan. 23 in 3D Printing and Additive Manufacturing<\/em>.<\/p>\n\n\n

\n
\"From
From the upper left to bottom right: the 3D printer creates a design; three printed pieces of a vase; the partially set vase pieces are put together; the mycelium grows on the coffee paste; the vase grows together; the finished vase holds flowers and water. \u00a9 Luo et al.\/3D Printing and Additive Manufacturing<\/figcaption><\/figure><\/div>\n\n\n
\n

\u201cWe\u2019re especially interested in creating systems for people like small businesses owners producing small-batch products \u2014 for example, small, delicate glassware that needs resilient packaging to ship,\u201d said lead author Luo<\/strong>. \u201cSo we\u2019ve been working on new material recipes that can replace things like Styrofoam with something more sustainable and that can be easily customized for small-scale production.\u201d<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n\n\n\n

To create the \u201cMycofluid\u201d paste, Luo mixed used coffee grounds with brown rice flour, Reishi mushroom spores, xanthan gum (a common food binder found in ice creams and salad dressings) and water. Luo also built a new 3D printer head for the Jubilee 3D printer<\/a> that the UW\u2019s Machine Agency lab designed. The new printer system can hold up to a liter of the paste.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

The team printed various objects with the Mycofluid: packaging for a small glass, three pieces of a vase, two halves of a Moai statue<\/a> and a two-piece coffin the size of a butterfly. The objects then sat covered in a plastic tub for 10 days, during which the mycelium formed a sort of shell around the Mycofluid. In the case of the statue and vase, the separate pieces also fused together.<\/p>\n\n\n

\n
\"3D
3D printing the coffee grounds allows for the creation of complex, interlocking pieces – such as this butterfly coffin. \u00a9 Luo et al.\/3D Printing and Additive Manufacturing<\/figcaption><\/figure><\/div>\n\n\n

The process is the same as that of homegrown mushroom kits: Keep the mycelium moist as it grows from a nutrient rich material. If the pieces stayed in the tub longer, actual mushrooms would sprout from the objects, but instead they\u2019re removed after the white mycelial skin has formed. Researchers then dried the pieces for 24 hours, which halts the fruiting of the mushrooms.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

The finished material is heavier than Styrofoam \u2014 closer to the density of cardboard or charcoal. After an hour in contact with water, it absorbed only 7% more weight in water and dried to close its initial weight while keeping its shape. It was as strong and tough as polystyrene<\/a> and expanded polystyrene foam, the substance used to make Styrofoam.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Though the team didn\u2019t specifically test the material\u2019s compostability, all its components are compostable (and, in fact, edible, though less than appetizing).<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Because the Mycofluid requires relatively homogeneous used coffee grounds, working with it at significant scale would prove difficult, but the team is interested in other forms of recycled materials that might form similar biopastes.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\n

\u201cWe\u2019re interested in expanding this to other bio-derived materials, such as other forms of food waste,\u201d Luo<\/strong> said. \u201cWe want to broadly support this kind of flexible development, not just to provide one solution to this major problem of plastic waste.\u201d<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n\n\n\n

Junchao Yang<\/a>, a UW master\u2019s student in human centered design and engineering when completing this research, is a co-author, and Nadya Peek<\/a>, UW associate professor of human centered design and engineering, is the senior author. This research was funded by the National Science Foundation.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Only 30% of a coffee bean is soluble in water, and many brewing methods aim to extract significantly less than that. So of the 1.6 billion pounds of coffee Americans consume in a year, more than 1.1 billion pounds of grounds are knocked from filters into compost bins and garbage cans. While watching the grounds from her […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":59,"featured_media":158722,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_seopress_robots_primary_cat":"none","nova_meta_subtitle":"The fungal mycelium could find its applications in compostable alternatives to Styrofoam","footnotes":""},"categories":[5572],"tags":[10588,25761,5838,25015,12239,19092,7105,5528],"supplier":[1144,2391],"class_list":["post-158685","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-bio-based","tag-3dprinting","tag-biodegradbility","tag-bioeconomy","tag-coffeegrounds","tag-compostability","tag-fungalmycelium","tag-packaging","tag-sustainability","supplier-national-science-foundation-usa","supplier-university-of-washington"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/renewable-carbon.eu\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/158685","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/renewable-carbon.eu\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/renewable-carbon.eu\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/renewable-carbon.eu\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/59"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/renewable-carbon.eu\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=158685"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/renewable-carbon.eu\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/158685\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/renewable-carbon.eu\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/158722"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/renewable-carbon.eu\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=158685"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/renewable-carbon.eu\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=158685"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/renewable-carbon.eu\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=158685"},{"taxonomy":"supplier","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/renewable-carbon.eu\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/supplier?post=158685"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}