I had a Pringles tube full of sawdust sitting on my kitchen counter in Indianapolis for about three weeks before anything interesting happened.
Okay, the sawdust was from the workshop at the Institute… discarded offcuts, the kind of thing that normally goes straight to the bin. I’d swept some into the cardboard tube on a whim, not really with a plan. Then I forgot about it. When I looked again, something had started colonising it. Mycelium — threadlike, white, working through the material from the inside.
That image stuck… you know, the substrate was waste. The container was trash. And something was growing.
the science works. adoption doesn’t.
Mycelium can break down petroleum hydrocarbons, plastics, heavy metals, and toxic organic compounds. Over 120 mycelial enzymes have been catalogued, each targeting different contaminants.1 That’s not a speculative claim… it’s been documented for decades. The problem is that mycoremediation has stayed in research contexts, dependent on regulatory timelines that don’t match how quickly the biology actually works.
The Pringles tube suggested a different question. If mycelium will grow on sawdust in a cardboard tube on a kitchen counter — no lab, no sterile conditions, minimal intervention… then the barrier to working with it isn’t technical. It’s a design problem. Nobody had built something that made it easy to live with.
what came out of the apartment
I took the idea to Idea Garden at IU Indianapolis and started 3D printing early forms for a substrate container… something more considered than a Pringles tube, but operating on the same principle. Porous structure, organic fill, mycelium does the work.
The result is MycelAir… a tower bio-purifier built around a replaceable core called the SporeCore.
The SporeCore is a printed form — algae-based PLA — pre-filled with inoculated substrate. You slot it into MycelAir. The device maintains humidity and airflow through an evaporative system, mushrooms grow over two to three weeks, and air circulating through the unit passes through the mycelial network where contaminants are broken down rather than trapped. When the core is spent, it goes back. A fresh one arrives.
the Pringles tube led to the SporeCore
The conceptual move that made the whole thing possible was accepting that an expended SporeCore isn’t waste… it’s a bioremediation agent ready for a second deployment. If mycelium becomes something people grow at home… something they replace, return, and interact with weekly — then the infrastructure for large-scale remediation builds itself through ordinary household behaviour.
Or, the spent substrate can go on to do meaningful work in a polluted waterway or on contaminated soil.
what i don’t know yet
MycelAir is a proof-of-concept. The apartment experiment confirmed the substrate principle. Idea Garden got the form to a testable state. But there’s a lot between here and something that works at scale.
The strain question is genuinely open — different mycelial strains biodegrade different contaminants, and matching SporeCore strains to local pollutant profiles requires data that doesn’t exist yet at the household level. Substrate formulation is the most critical and least solved variable. And the return logistics for thousands of spent cores is a harder problem than the product itself.
The Pringles tube still sits in my kitchen. Different tube, same principle.
The thing that keeps the project honest is that it started with actual mold in a cardboard tube, not a design brief.