Workshop: Straw

Domestic sheep’s wool is too coarse and rough for the textile industry. The infrastructure for washing, combing and spinning wool has disappeared from Europe. The wool we wear is made from Australian, New Zealand or South African sheep’s wool, processed in Southeast Asia. In Germany, one shearing of wool weighs approx. 4-5 kg. The shearing costs per animal are around EUR 3-4. On the market, the wool discount per kilo is between 10 and 40 cents. According to the German Animal Welfare Cadaver Act, the wool must be disposed of as hazardous waste, which incurs significant costs.

Folke Köbberling deals with the raw material raw wool, a material that insulates, acoustically filters, smells, greases, heals, warms and insulates, in order to develop new ways of using it. One option is to make soundproof walls from sheep’s wool. As an absorber material, it is an alternative to synthetic materials for noise barriers along railroad lines, for example. Sheep’s wool is compostable, untreated and a habitat for insects.

• Biological systems are adaptable, live, breathe and regenerate themselves
• Building materials such as insulation foam are harmful to the environment and do not rot for hundreds of years Mushrooms can be used for this very function
• The mushroom bricks are made from the roots of common tree fungi from the forest, such as the tinder fungus or the shiny lacquer fungus.
• Organic waste from the agricultural and wood industries such as straw, hemp fibers, corn stalks and sawdust are also required. They act as a substrate, are mixed with the mycelia and a nutrient solution and filled into special containers such as hollow bricks.
• Fungi, whose filamentous network can spread underground over immense areas, are a kind of waste disposal in nature, masters of the decomposition of biomass, but also masters of synthesis. They could break down plant-based raw materials into their components using active enzymes, but also reassemble them for a wide variety of products.
• The fungal mycelium can be used to produce three-dimensional composite materials, bio-bricks. They can be used to make furniture, produce insulating materials and create buildings. The big plus here is that the building materials made from mushrooms are compostable.
• Mushroom bricks, known as bio-bricks, which are made from mushroom threads and plant residues, can be used to construct houses and buildings that are as stable as concrete.