Architizer Sustainability Influencer Partnership

As part of the Sustainability Influencer Series by Architizer, an online platform and publication focused on empowering architects to build better buildings with better materials, Healthy Materials Lab is publishing a series of articles.

We highlight healthier, sustainable materials that hold potential to be game changers for people’s health, ecologies, and economies when they go mainstream. Some questions we’re particularly excited about are the subjects of these new articles.

Can mushrooms and mycelium help fight both food and housing insecurity? In our first article of the series, we talk with redhouse studio Founder and Principal, Christopher Maurer about MycoHab: a fungi-fueled project out of Namibia. They are growing and harvesting oyster mushrooms which are being sold to local groceries, restaurants and hotels, with hopes of eventually addressing food insecurity in the country. Here’s the kicker––after the mushrooms are harvested, the waste that’s left behind, teeming with mycelium, is turned into myco-blocks that could rival concrete and will be used to build affordable housing.

Will hemp-growing in Northern Minnesota help the housing and unemployment crisis while sequestering carbon? On the White Earth Reservation, environmentalist Winona LaDuke is expanding her hemp operation to provide food, medicine, and clothing to her community. Now, in partnership with Healthy Materials Lab, that hemp is being leveraged to create new models of sustainable, healthy homes. We will test new construction systems and propose training programs that will create new jobs. Through this process we will create models of prototypical housing for the future: healthy homes for all people.

Could microplastics be drastically reduced if we stop using acrylic latex paints? There is new evidence of an under-reported key player in our plastics crisis: paint. Acrylic latex paints found in big box stores are made of fossil fuels, just like plastic. This means that covering a room with these paints is like sealing it in a toxic, plastic bubble. These plastic paints don’t just cause harm while on our walls––recent studies have shown that paint is responsible for a shocking 58% of microplastic pollution in our oceans, waterways, and land. We highlight the myriad mineral based paints that have been used for centuries across the globe and could be a key solution to our plastic paint problem.