Harvesting Housing

We’ve spent this season tracing how fungi––and especially mycelium––can shake up industries and remediate the harm caused by climate change. We’ve talked about foraging, growing, healing and commercializing mycelium. But there’s one frontier we saved for this episode, the last of this season. It’s one that, here at Healthy Materials Lab, we’re honestly most excited about: affordable housing.

We speak with Chris Maurer and the team at BioHab, who are building housing with mycelium. They’re getting started with a motivated community in Namibia, and they aim to take this project as far as Mars!

This project represents the culmination of our exploration of fungi (and aligns with HML’s big audacious goal of making all affordable housing with healthy materials). BioHab is, all at once, addressing waste issues, food insecurity, carbon sequestration, affordable housing, circularity… all powered by fungi.

If you want to know how they’re doing that, listen to episode 5 now.

Subscribe and listen to the episode on Apple, Spotify, Stitcher, or anywhere you listen to podcasts.

Here’s a link to the clip of Chis’ colleague smashing a cement and mycoblock that’s mentioned in the episode.