Upcycling mushroom waste to replace animal derived chemicals

Objective

Animal-derived materials are surprisingly widespread in everyday products. For example, in the cosmetics, pharmaceutical and agrochemicals industries, squalene (from shark liver oil), chitin/chitosan (from crustaceans) and animal-derived proteins and fats are widely exploited despite growing ethical and sustainability concerns. Fungal biomass is rich in chitin, while recent advances in fermentation technologies offer opportunities to convert fungal glucans into microbial proteins, oils and even triterpenes such as squalene. However, scalability is a major challenge, due to the limited availability of clean fungal biomass and competition with food/feed value chains. Moreover, oil production using existing fungal fermentation routes is limited to low-value triglycerides, and efficient product extraction remains a bottleneck. Feedstock diversification is needed, alongside innovation towards higher-value products and more efficient processes. The production of edible mushrooms produces ~189M tpa of mycelium rich wastes, contaminated with lignocellulosic growth substrate. This contamination makes these wastes unsuitable for food/feeds, and incompatible with existing valorisation approaches. MYCOCIRCLE will focus on this challenging feedstock, developing new technologies including an enzymatic fractionation process, two parallel fermentation routes, and novel enzymatic chitin conversion reactions. The resulting product streams, including fungal chitosan/chito-oligosaccharides, a high-value squalene-rich microbial oil, and microbial proteins, will be validated as replacements to animal derived materials in cosmetic and agrochemical applications. The MYCOCIRCLE consortium represents the entire value chain, from feedstock producers (SYLVAN, KORONA) to industrial biotechnology companies (GST), and end users (GI, THGL). This value chain will be supported by world experts in biomass valorisation, enzymatic processing, and SSbD development: TUM, SINTEF, NMBU, SLU and IDENER.