Consider this: a remote population, limited employment but a willing workforce. Add a desperate need for affordable housing, but an absence of affordable building materials. Any number of situations might give rise to this dilemma. But it can occur frequently in countries with remote populations of indigenous people. The Canadian North is one.
What can be done about this absence of a literal foundation of affordable housing? Flying in heavy construction materials such as bricks is often ridiculously expensive. And yet the lack of such ordinarily cheap and available materials is a major impediment in supplying affordable housing for a population in serious need.
Recent experiments have been exploring the potential of a couple of unusual possibilities for affordable housing construction. One of them is to grow mushrooms locally, then bake them into bricks.
Seriously?
Well perhaps not precisely, allowing for a general lack of knowledge about mushrooms and other forms of fungi. If we broaden our understanding to appreciate the role of mycelium, which is an initial growth stage in the life of a fungus, we might better appreciate how growing, and then baking it might possibly create a viable, inexpensive building material.
How could it work? Read more about how Assistant Professor Mercedes Garcia-Holguera, who is based at the University of Manitoba, is currently tackling this challenge, in The Manitoban: Assistant Professor Uses Biomaterials In Construction
For another post about the prospects of mushrooms (although not in the Canada’s north), try: Homes Built With Mushrooms? For Real? Or Just A Happy Hallucination?
