According to Time Magazine, an average of 27.4 million diapers are discarded every year — and that’s just in the U.S. alone.
When facing a plastic crisis of that scale, where do you begin?
That’s the question that Tero Isokauppila has been working on for years. Isokauppila is a 13-generation family farmer and mushroom expert from Finland.
After becoming a first-time parent, Isokauppila wanted to find a better alternative for disposable diapers.
When he started looking into it, the prospects were bleaker than he expected.
“If we talk about disposable diapers, every one of those is in a landfill,” Isokauppila said in an interview with Mushroom Revival host Alex Dorr. “We create more to circle the Earth a few 100 times every year, and there are zero biodegradable diapers.”
“All of the ‘eco diapers’ are green washing, and…there's bunch of examples using plant-based materials that take yield from food production, but also create even more micro plastics and perform worse on the baby, creating more more rashes and blowouts.”
After moving to Austin, Texas, Isokauppila co-founded HIRO Technologies — a startup that has been developing “mycodigestible” products that break down soft plastics in landfills.
“Imagine a world where nature can help heal nature, where you can be confident that your discarded plastics are actually being broken down, not polluting our world and our bodies,” Isokauppila and his team wrote in their 2024 Kickstarter.
“15 years ago, scientists first discovered plastic-eating fungi in the Amazon and have continued to study them ever since,” Isokauppila said, referring to the fungus Pestalotiopsis microspora that Yale University researchers discovered in 2011, which breaks down plastics like polyurethane.
Plastics like the liners in diapers.
So, after four years of research, they created HIRO Diapers: Diapers that contain fungi pouches, which “wake up” in landfills two weeks after disposal. Within a year, the fungus breaks the diaper down completely.
“What we can do is actually break down really recalcitrant — meaning really hard to break down — pollutants, stuff that sticks around for a long time,” Danielle Stevenson, the head of research and development at HIRO Technologies, told Mushroom Revival.
“A lot of decomposer fungi use carbon as their food source, right? So they can break down even complex polymers, such as those found in plastics and other petroleum-based products that end up as pollutants.”
“This is a lot better than the conventional way that we remediate or clean up pollution in the environment, or deal with hazardous waste and other waste by…digging it up and dumping it somewhere else,” Stevenson reasoned.
“The exciting potential to work with fungi here is that instead of just moving the pollution around and not really solving the problem, not really dealing with it, we can work with fungi to actually, you know, deal with the pollution on-site.”
Following a successful Kickstarter launch, HIRO diapers are currently available for purchase online.
But when Isokauppila studies mushrooms in the lab, he sees a world of possibilities that go far beyond baby bottoms.
“If we can break down a diaper, we can break down anything,” Isokauppila told Fast Company. “Once we’ve gained enough market share, we can partner with other brands and bring this technology to the world.”
Header image via Pixabay Creative Commons CC0 1.0 Universal Public Domain
