Fungi Could Turn Fast Fashion's Waste Problem Into Building Materials
- Gauri Khanna
- 2 hours ago
- 3 min read
Too long to read? Go for the highlights below.
Researchers have colonised unsorted textile waste with fungi to produce composites strong enough for semi-structural construction use.
The same textile feedstock can yield edible mushrooms, creating a dual-output system from waste material.
The resulting composites are biodegradable, repairable, and can be reshaped simply by adding water.
Fungi vs Fashion's Waste Problem
Every year, the European Union alone generates 12.6 million tonnes of textile waste. Of that, only 22% is re-used or recycled; the remaining 78% is incinerated or sent to landfill (European Commission, 2023). Fast fashion has accelerated this cycle by turning clothing into a near-disposable good: a shift that carries real environmental costs. Within the EU, clothing ranks fourth for pressure on raw materials and water use, and fifth for greenhouse gas emissions across all consumption categories.
Conventional recycling approaches, which rely on dissolving cellulose fibres and re-spinning them, struggle with degraded or blended fabrics. Cotton-polyester blends, among the most common textile types in circulation, are particularly difficult to separate. The result is that most waste clothing, even when collected separately, ends up exported to Africa or Asia, where responsible disposal is far from guaranteed.
A team of researchers from the University of Vienna and the University of Tartu, publishing in Resources, Conservation and Recycling, has proposed an unconventional route out of this impasse: growing fungi directly onto the waste. Their study demonstrates that Ganoderma lucidum—a bracket fungus widely studied for its structural properties—can colonise unsorted, blended textile waste without any preprocessing whatsoever. No sorting, no cleaning, no chemical pre-treatment. The fungal mycelium binds the fibres together from within, transforming loose waste into a cohesive composite material.
Building Strength Layer by Layer
The manufacturing approach draws on techniques from industrial composite engineering. The researchers stacked multiple layers of fungus-colonised textile—much like the layered fibre mats used in traditional composite manufacturing—and consolidated them into a single, uniform material. The process allowed for customisable thickness and free-form shaping, giving the final product a flexibility that rigid synthetic composites often lack.
One notable finding was that oxygen availability varied across the depth of the textile stacks during fungal growth, meaning the mycelium colonised surface layers more densely than interior ones. When composites were assembled using only these better-colonised surface plies, tensile strength—the resistance to being pulled apart—reached up to 14 megapascals (MPa). Flexural strength, measuring resistance to bending, came in at 7 MPa, while shear strength reached 0.5 MPa.
Taken together, these figures place the material within range for semi-structural construction applications, such as interior panels or non-load-bearing partition walls. This adds to a growing body of evidence that mycelium-based materials can serve serious functional roles beyond novelty or packaging.
More Than a Composite: A Dual-Output System
Perhaps the most striking aspect of the research is the dual-use potential of the textile feedstock. The same waste material that yields structural composites can also be induced to fruit—that is, to produce mushrooms. The team achieved a fruiting body yield of 5.7% by weight.
Those mushrooms are themselves a source of chitin-glucan complex, a naturally occurring polymer with applications in pharmaceuticals, cosmetics, and materials science.
The resulting composites also carry useful end-of-life properties. They are biodegradable under appropriate conditions and, unusually, can be rehydrated to become pliable again—enabling repair or reconfiguration rather than disposal. This positions mycelium-textile composites alongside other innovative fungal material developments that challenge the assumption that durability and biodegradability are mutually exclusive.
Whether the process can scale economically to handle the volumes that industrial textile waste demands remains an open question. But as a proof of concept, it suggests that the fungal kingdom may yet find a productive use for fashion's most persistent problem.
