eben bayer and gavin mcintyre: ecovative

22 lifestyles magazine Summer 2014

Package DealWritten by Darren Gluckman | Photography courtesy of Ecovative

Move over, Styrofoam, see you later, Bubble Wrap. Eben Bayer and Gavin McIntyre’s Ecovative is the new (environmentally-friendly) kid in town.

t may not be every child’s dream to wind up on the cover of Packaging World. Sports lllus-

trated, maybe. Rolling Stone. Wired, even. But in July 2011, when the packaging industry’s glam-our publication featured Ecovative’s patented system for creating mushroom-based packag-ing, it was a mark of professional recognition for the young company and its equally youthful founders, and more than just a shot across the bow of Dow Chemical, the maker of the ubiqui-tous polystyrene foam product known far and wide by its trademarked moniker, Styrofoam.

Polystyrene foam exploded onto the com-mercial scene in the mid-1950s. Like many items now in common use—wooden stack-ing pallets, for instance—its success was, in a sense, a by-product of the war effort. When Southeast Asia fell to Japan, the U.S. lost access to the Malaysian and Sri Lankan rubber tree plantations that had supplied American indus-try. Dow Chemical had produced vast stocks of styrene in the course of a shuttered initiative to create synthetic rubber. When the army couldn’t get its hands on the real stuff, Dow stepped into the breach and quickly became the dominant manufacturer of what would become Styrofoam and its relatives. (Styrofoam is, strictly speaking, blue and was primarily used, at least initially, for insulation; its sister products include polystyrene packing peanuts and coffee cups.) During the war, one of its uses was in flotation devices, like emergency rafts, for ocean-going troops.

There are, according to its detractors, a few issues with polystyrene foam. To begin with,

it’s manufactured from petroleum, a fossil fuel that takes eons to generate, that is consumed at an unsustainable rate, and whose extrac-tion and transportation can pose significant environmental risks (e.g., fracking hazards and oil spills). In addition, it takes forever to biodegrade; it’s not susceptible to photolysis, the process by which molecular structures are broken down by exposure to light. Its extreme buoyancy has earned it the distinction of be-ing the single most common form of marine debris, to say nothing of its steadily increasing ubiquity in land-based waste sites. And as it makes its way into the food chain, it leaches suspected carcinogens and neurotoxins into the digestive tracts of both the animals who eat it and the people who eat them.

At An Age when most north American teens don’t associate mushrooms with vegetables, Eben Bayer, tall as a small tree, was scurrying the length and breadth of his father’s sugar farm in rural Vermont, tapping thousands of maple trees and running the sap through a vast network of PVC tubes to a vat in the sugarhouse, where the sap was boiled with the aid of a wood-chip fueled burner. When, as part of his duties, he shoveled scoopfuls of wood chips into the furnace, he noticed that mounds of chips were sometimes clumped together, adhered to one another by myce-lium growths that had sprouted in the dank, darkened conditions of the tarp-covered pit. Mycelium is the vegetative root system of fungi, like mushrooms, and can be infinitesi-

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Eben Bayer and Gavin McIntyre.indd 22 14/5/26 4:13 PM

23lifestyles magazineSummer 2014

Cover Profile eben bayer and gavin mcintyre

Eben Bayer and Gavin McIntyre



mally small or—as is the case of a patch of growth in eastern Oregon—can cover as much as 10 square kilometers.

Bayer’s experience with this ingenious substance served him well when, in his senior year at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute (RPI, “America’s oldest technological research university”) in Troy, New York, he enrolled in a class called Inventor’s Studio, helmed by a man called Burt Swersey. Now in his late seventies, Swersey had developed a long-standing reputa-tion for impatience with lame ideas. Struggling for an end-of-term concept that would satisfy his irascible professor, Bayer flashed back to his teenage labors and the binding properties of mycelium. He ordered a mushroom-growing kit, then threw the spores in a glass jar with water and a handful of perlite pebbles. Within a few days, he’d cultivated a solid white disk, the perlite bound stiffly together by a thick web of mycelium. Swersey was, for once, impressed.

Bayer, now 28, had befriended a classmate, Gavin McIntyre, whose parents—a mechanical engineer and a radiation scientist—worked at Long Island’s Brookhaven National Labora-tory. “When I first met Gavin,” says Bayer of his collaborator, Ecovative’s co-founder (and now its chief scientist; Bayer is its CEO), “I was im-pressed with his work ethic, and also his firm belief that anything is possible—so important when starting a business.” Swersey was aware that the boys had talked of starting a company together. He persuaded them to reenroll in his

course the following semester in order to develop this myce-lium idea further. Upon graduation, McIntyre lined up a job at Brookhaven and Bayer was recruited by the defense industry’s Applied Research Associates back in his home state of Vermont. But Swersey the skeptic, once persuaded, was relentless. He called them repeatedly over the summer, adamant that they quit their careerist positions and focus on turning their project into a going concern. He promised he’d invest a portion of his retirement savings to help get it off the ground. His tenacity won them over and, with about three months’ worth of operat-ing capital, they set up shop in borrowed space that Swersey secured for them at RPI. (Swersey would become a key member of the venture’s advisory board, and Bayer says he continues to serve as a sort of resident mentor. “He usually stops in once every other week or so and continues to push us as he did in our early days.”)

With Swersey’s financial and institutional support, and the prize money that began to trickle in from technological compe-titions they entered, their company—then called Greensulate, on account of an early, insulation panel iteration—achieved liftoff. They experimented furiously, and the movie-montage version of this phase would likely include the moment a small but unanticipated explosion removed McIntyre’s eyebrows (since regrown). They brought in a mycologist—the fancy way of saying mushroom expert—who helped them in the search for the perfect polypore (a type of fungi with particularly robust mycelium), the name of which is now a carefully guarded trade secret. In 2008, a mere year after graduating from RPI, the com-pany garnered attention after winning the €500,000 top prize in Holland’s PICNIC Green Challenge, and in 2009, Ecovative deci-sively shifted its focus from insulation; going forward, it would deliver mushroom-based packaging alternatives to that dreaded plastic foam. TED Talks and other prestigious opportunities


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The Ecovative team outside their facility in

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to present its vision soon followed, and were themselves quickly followed by expressions of interest from investors, including the global manufacturing conglomerate 3M. Brand-name clients have signed on. Dell Computers, Puma, Crate & Barrel. Sealed Air, the multibillion-dollar packaging and materials company, producer of, among other things, Bubble Wrap, has licensed Ecovative’s mushroom-packaging technology and has adapted an Iowa factory to start churning the stuff out.

Ecovative’s own physical plant has expand-ed, from the cramped, first-floor studio at RPI to an eight-thousand-square-foot space in the (almost too aptly named) Green Island, New York, to the thirty-two thousand square feet of its current premises across the road. It’s there that agricultural waste like cornstalks and husks are pasteurized, injected with nutrients and water, and infused with mycelium pellets. The mixture is poured into customized molds, where, with virtually no external energy re-quired, the mycelium gets to work binding the crop waste (in the U.S., largely corn by-prod-ucts, but in places like China, for instance, rice hulls can supply the necessary substrate). Four days later, after flash heating stops the growth process, the result is an industrial strength, 100 percent biodegradable packaging product. McIntyre rejects the term bioengineering to describe what Ecovative does, preferring bio-adaption. “We’re not engineering an organism to work in an industrial setting,” he says, “but rather leveraging the innate abilities that na-ture presents into the manufacturing process.”

BAyer And mcIntyre Are Avowed- ly interested in advancing our collective environmental health, but they’re hardly indif-ferent to the success of their business venture. Bayer has said he wants Ecovative “to be the Dow or DuPont of this century.” In an e-mail exchange, he acknowledges that, “in terms of defending our turf, we do all the normal things companies do around intellectual property

and trade secrets; just as important, we continue to innovate and constantly strive to outdo ourselves.” And McIntyre says he continues to be impressed by Bayer’s leadership of their corpo-rate baby. That said, both of them express enthusiasm for their competitors.

“We’re very grateful for competition,” Bayer says, “since by definition, our competition is other responsible alternatives to synthetic plastics, which advances our core goal of improv-ing the planet.” They cite as examples bioMASON (a company that “grows” bricks from sand) and Dutch State Mines, which McIntyre notes “is orienting itself in a bio-based direction.”

This commitment to the cause is reflected in some extracur-ricular pursuits. “When I’m not working at Ecovative,” Bayer reveals, “I spend most of my time outside. I’m currently restor-ing a 100-year-old mountaintop farm in Troy. I’ve also been working on off-grid energy systems, building a small hydroelec-tric system for future farm buildings, which is a real mixture of old technology and new, including a custom-built remote access that lets me ‘text’ the hydro site when I need more power.” You know, just your typical, garden-variety weekend-type stuff.

ecovAtIve mAy Be A young, cuttIng-edge tech company, a disrupter in the best sense of that overused word, but that doesn’t mean its sprawling headquarters feature Ping-Pong tables, foosball, or employee hot tubs.

“I know it’s not very hip,” says Bayer, “but we’ve never had a very Silicon Valley ‘we-work-on-nonsense’ office culture. We’re serious about what we’re doing and we recognize that changing the material and energy flows of our planet is no easy task. So: no raw juice bar, no free massages, and no food court.” It’s not all work, no play, though. “We make time for our team with month-ly events, including off-site hikes deep in the woods, complete with late-night saunas punctuated by jumping into ice ponds under the stars.” And, he concedes, “we do have a basketball hoop on our manufacturing floor.” This sentiment is an echo of a comment he made about Internet start-ups in a very thorough New Yorker profile last year. “Internet start-ups are great,” he sniffed, “but they’re not, you know, making anything.”Ecovative isn’t just making things; it’s making a difference.


The Mushroom® Wine Shipper keeps wine cool during transport.

Ecovative’s materials achieve

a Class A fire resistance rating

(ASTM E84).


eben bayer and gavin mcintyre: ecovative

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