Cotton Makes for Eco-Friendly Packaging Material
March 4, 2011 
Add “environmentally friendly packaging material” to the growing list of feathers in cotton’s cap.
In a meeting at the Beltwide Cotton Conferences, Sam Harrington, a design engineer with Ecovative Design, told the story of how his company came to use cotton byproducts to create packaging materials used to ship furniture across the nation.
The process began, he says, with the realization that common packaging materials like Styrofoam are very harmful for the environment due to their inability to decompose properly over time.
“It’s crazy to use (packaging materials like Styrofoam) for applications that you typically are done with after a few days or a week. It’s going to last there for tens of thousands of years. We wanted a solution to fit into nature’s recycling system,” said Harrington.
To achieve that goal, Harrington and his company harnessed the ability of mushrooms to decompose natural materials, and recognized that these mushrooms could be used as an adhesive substance, like glue. They soon discovered that this glue best adhered to cotton byproducts. At the Ecovative pilot plant in Green Island, NY, the company began to mold these mushroom and cotton byproduct combinations into sturdy packaging materials.
Known as EcoCradle, the packaging material is made primarily of cotton, and will decompose quickly.
“This is a solution that matches the cost and actually exceeds the performance of the synthetic polymers that (shipping companies) had been using,” said Harrington.
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