Fungi-based plastic alternative wins Buckminster Fuller Challenge

“In addition to being one of 10 esteemed finalists in the Cradle to Cradle Product Innovation Challenge, Ecovative Design — AKA the New York-based startup behind a game-changing bio-material that’s “grown” from agricultural waste and mushroom mycelia and can be used for packaging, insulation, and more — has won the sixth annual Buckminster Fuller Challenge.

 

Last year, top honors went to the Living Building Institute.

 

Deemed as “Socially-Responsible Design’s Highest Award” by Metropolis magazine, the Buckminster Fuller Challenge aims to “support the development and implementation of a strategy that has significant potential to solve humanity’s most pressing problems.” In this particular instance, the pressing problem at hand would be our reliance on highly polluting conventional plastics. With this big win, Ecovative Design has exemplified a famous quote from the late futurist, “gentle revolutionist,” and father of the geodesic dome himself, Buckminster Fuller: “To change something, build a new model that makes the existing model obsolete.”

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