The green building market is anticipated to be among the fastest growing industries worldwide. Driven by citizen and building owner demand for sustainability and operational cost reduction, the green building market is, indeed, doubling every three years. To satisfy the market demand for sustainable and functional building solutions we developed MOGU floor, a disruptive product for the resilient flooring market. MOGU floor is a 100% biobased tile made from agricultural or industrial residual biomass. It outperforms the competing solutions already available on the market in terms of safety, fire resistance, thermal insulation, shock and noise absorption. The entire lifecycle of MOGU floor, including production, installation, maintenance and disposal, represents a new circular value chain for the building market, highly sustainable and profitable. Moreover MOGU floor has a distinctive and attractive design and tactile feeling that make it a perfect solution for luxury living environments at a target price typical of inferior market segments. To take advantage of all the unique selling points of MOGU floor we developed a market strategy aiming at quickly gain international market share and become in the mid-term a reference player for innovation, sustainability and design in the flooring market. To achieve such result, we elaborated a number of actions in collaboration with highly influential stakeholder of the building market to increase customer awareness and demand for MOGU floor. Now we are applying to the SME instrument ph2 as part of our fundraising strategy to finalize the development of the first MOGU floor collection and accelerate its market uptake. During the 24 months workplan we elaborated we are going to certify MOGU floor with strategic green labels, upscale our production capacity, reinforce our IPR and market positioning and start the b2b collaborations to promote, commercialize and distribute MOGU floor.

As one of the primary consumers of environmental resource, the building industry faces unprecedented challenges in needing to reduce the environmental impact of current consumption practices. This applies to both the construction of the built environment and resource consumption during its occupation and use. Where incremental improvements to current practices can be realised, the net benefits are often far outstripped by the burgeoning demands of rapidly increasing population growth and urbanisation. Against the backdrop of this grand societal challenge, it is necessary to explore approaches that envision a paradigm shift in how material is sourced, processed and assembled to address the magnitude of these challenges in a truly sustainable way, and which can even provide added value. We propose to develop a structural substrate by using live fungal mycelium (WP2), functionalise the substrate with nanoparticles and polymers to make a mycelium-based electronics (WP3), implement sensorial fusion and decision making in the fungal electronics (WP4) and to growing monolithic buildings from the functionalized fungal substrate (WP5). Fungal buildings will self-grow, build, and repair themselves subject to substrate supplied, use natural adaptation to the environment, sense all what human can sense. To achieve the goal we assembled a small but efficient consortium comprised of architects and designers (CITA), computer scientists and biophysicists (UWE), mycologists (UU), experts in mycelium-based technologies for the production (MOGU).

The aim of BIOBUILD project is to develop and demonstrate fully bio-based building materials with thermal storage function that can replace high environmental footprint products. Our solution demonstrates functional incorporation of bio-based phase change materials (bioPCMs) into solid wood and wood fibres bound by plant oil resins, lignin, or fungal mycelia to produce novel bio-composite building materials with significantly improved thermal properties. The novel materials possess a high multifunctional performance, meet requirements for sustainable “green” production, and ensure end-of-life options and recycling. Environmental and social impacts and benefits are fully integrated into the life-cycle perspective.

There is a need for a ground-breaking technology to boost crop yield (both grains and biomass) and its processing into materials of economic interests. Novel crops with enhanced photosynthesis and assimilation of green-house gasses, such as carbon dioxide (CO2) and ozone (O3), and tailored straw suitable for industrial manufacturing will be the foundation of this radical change. We are an alliance of European plant breeding companies, straw processing companies and academic plant scientists aiming to use the major advances in photosynthetic knowledge to improve barley yield and to exploit the variability of barley straw quality and composition. We will capitalize on very promising strategies to improve the photosynthetic properties and ozone assimilation of barley: i) tuning leaf chlorophyll content and modifying canopy architecture; ii) increasing the kinetics of photosynthetic responses to changes in irradiance; iii), introducing photorespiration bypasses; iv) modulating stomatal opening, thus increasing the rate of CO2 fixation and O3 assimilation. Beside the higher yield, the resulting barley straw will be tailored to: i) increase straw protein content to make it suitable as an alternative feed production source; ii) control cellulose/lignin contents and lignin properties to develop construction panels and straw reinforced polymer composites. To do so, we aim to exploit barley natural- and induced-genetic variability as well as gene editing and transgenic engineering. Based on precedent, we expect that improving our targeted traits will result in increases in above ground total biomass production by 15-20% without modification of the harvest index, and there will be added benefits in sustainability via better resource-use efficiency of water and nitrogen. A public dialogue will be established to ensure stakeholder engagement and explore the acceptability of a range of technologies as potential routes to crop improvement and climate change mitigation.

The aim of MY-FI is to provide the textile industry with a new nonwoven fabrics made of mycelium fibres, with improved performances and reduced environmental impact in comparison with current commercially available fibres. Mycelium fibres are obtained by fungal fermentation, starting from the residues of the textile indusrty, using a mild process and can be used to produce sustainable and performing nonwoven fabrics. Mycelium fibres indeed can extend the field of use of nonwoven fabrics to demanding or luxury applications. In virtue of their properties and aesthetics, mycelium fibres can be adopted, for example, in automotive or footwear applications that currently use animal leather as preferred material. In MY-FI new biofabrication protocols will be optimized and upscaled together with wet processing and material finishing to provide a set of innovative solutions to help the textile industry in facing the challenges posed by the complex megatrends that are quickly chagning markets and customers' lifestyles globally. The mission of MY-FI is to develop a biobased textile, with advanced functionalities, sustainability and performance, achieving four high level goals: 1. empowering the textile industry to successfully face the challenges posed by the emerging global trends; 2. meet the consumer demand for new functional and sustainable textile products; 3. relief the environmental pressure related to the textile industry, developing a circular and biobased textile that does not generate microplastics. 4. engage the textile stakeholders and provide guidance to policymakers Mycelium fabrics indeed are fully biobased and sustainable, obtained from circular value chains, widely customizable, highly performing, and can be produced using advanced manufacturing process. Thanks to these properties they have the potential to meet the market demands for sustainable and performing materials, allowing designers and brands to create more functional products.