Mycelium skins function as sustainable substrates for high-performance electronic devices and batteries for a green future.
Electronic devices are irrevocably integrated into our lives. Yet, their limited lifetime and often improvident disposal demands sustainable concepts to realize a green electronic future. Research must shift its focus on substituting nondegradable and difficult-to-recycle materials to allow either biodegradation or facile recycling of electronic devices. Here, we demonstrate a concept for growth and processing of fungal mycelium skins as biodegradable substrate material for sustainable electronics. The skins allow common electronic processing techniques including physical vapor deposition and laser patterning for electronic traces with conductivities as high as 9.75 ± 1.44 × 104 S cm−1. The conformal and flexible electronic mycelium skins withstand more than 2000 bending cycles and can be folded several times with only moderate resistance increase. We demonstrate mycelium batteries with capacities as high as ~3.8 mAh cm−2 used to power autonomous sensing devices including a Bluetooth module and humidity and proximity sensor.
I'm wracking my insomniac brain trying to come up with something so ephemeral it suits a fortnight of life. Shark tags? I'm not sure whether Fast Fashion meeting e-waste is a net gain ... In e-waste.
My mind went to sounding balloons electronics. Launched multiple times a day from multiple locations, land pretty much wherever, often recovered by amateurs but often not. Electronics are not the worst environmental offender on those payloads (batteries, Styrofoam case...) but it checks the tickboxes of short lived electronics.