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Eureka: Soundproofing with mushrooms – how greener panels are making their way into studios
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Foreign. You're listening to Eureka on Monocle Radio. Brought to you by the team behind the entrepreneurs. The show all about inspiring people, innovative companies and fresh ideas in global business. I'm Tom Edwards. Robert Strazer is an electronics and physics enthusiast from Latvia with a knack for blending mechanical precision with creative ideas. His latest project is Sporinex, a company that's developing sustainable acoustic solutions using mycelium and circular waste materials. Sporinex makes acoustic panels, the kind you'll find in recording studios, theatres or restaurants. But unlike traditional petroleum based foams, these panels are made from wood waste. So they don't just dampen sound, they're better for the planet and they can even be returned to the earth as fertilizer after their life. Here is Roberts with more on the Sporinex story.
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I'm Robert Stresse and my company name is Sporonax. Perhaps you know this foam base like acoustical panels and like studios, restaurants and so on. And they're right now made from petroleum mainly. And what we are doing, we're taking wood waste, for instance, like wood dust from grinding and so on. Like the wood you usually don't use but burn or just put in a bin or whatever. And we are taking that, growing a mycelium like a mushroom in it and creating sound panels of that. And now even we are looking into expanding it into algae base. So we are taking the blue algae, which, like, I'm from Latvia, so it's Baltic Sea nearby and we have extreme problem of blue algae because like fertilization goes in the sea and it just grows like uncontrollably and it kills other species. So now it's something that we want to get, not just waste, you know, it's something we want to get rid of, but we don't want to like let the CO2 in it go in the atmosphere, right? So we are taking that and growing mycelium and creating a sound panels. But afterwards, this is the best part. You are tired of your studio or whatever. You just want a fresh beginning. You can take your sound panels from the studio and use it as a fertilizer for your garden flowers or in this case, trees. So eventually the carbon which came from like wood waste goes through the process and goes back as for instance, fertilizer for the woods. So originally from like first grade, something like that, I was like working with the wood and then I was also doing music school, so I'm playing piano and so on. Two, three years back, I started doing electrical music and I was in studio playing Something and you know, like those studios which are like all black, you know, with all foam, like in everywhere, like simply under table even, you know, I was like, this is not good. I was reading something like how they produce it and it's like, maybe I can do better. And then sometime later I was working my workshop, like wood workshop. And it was like regular cleaning, you know, after like months doing something, you have to clean it up. And I was cleaning and dust and like I have like three 50 liters bags full of wood, you know, like waste basically you something you cannot use. I was like, oh, actually this kind of works. I have this material which I don't use because I knew in industry they sometimes use for instance, like small wood chunks and like just put on them on walls and like a bags to have it like a soundproof. But it's not the best option. It's. It's not good quality. It's just temporary solution for that. And I was like, okay, how can I like make those like small particles stick together, you know, like glue. It's. I don't want to do that. Really. Then this was like, okay, resin, like from Latvia. It's like we have an enormous amount of resin, etc. So, okay, I tried something, but it's so complicated. You have to heat it up to 300 degrees and it's messy. The chemicals which are coming out are like toxic. And at the same time, approximately one of my friends said like, oh, I'm growing like eatable mushrooms at my home. You know, you have those small like boxes. And I ordered one. I tried it. I've made like a cube of it and I tried it and it was like, oh, this is like solid, you know, and I can't break it and so on. This is actually what I was searching for. I tried it and it worked out great. It was like I could make almost any form. Now you just put in mold and you have like any form possible. Believe me, when you say to musician, like some, you know, like in general musicians are of artists. And you would say, oh, well, this is a mushroom. They are sold already. You know, mushroom. What? Like what many would have had question, like, why like music? Why not just like for instance restaurants or like public spaces. And my philosophy there is that if you want to do something with a sound, then the music industry is the best one because it's going to be the hardest feedback, it's going to be the hardest answers, the hardest questions. And if you prove that, well, this product can survive through music industry, then it can do whatever, you know, in any industry. So the idea is hopefully during this year to the end of the year to I know it's, it's a bit big go, but it's a thousand square meters of sound panels. These thousand square meters gonna replace 50 tons of CO2. And also a smaller goal is to get the production in a scale. So idea is to produce at least 100 square meters a month.
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That was Robert Strazer, the founder of Sporinex. And you can learn more about this most innovative of businesses by heading to sporinex.com and that's all for this episode of Eureka. My thanks to Ian Wylie for his reporting. We'll be back at the same time next week. Do look out for the Entrepreneurs, which is available every Wednesday. The program is produced by Laura Kramer with audio editing by Jack Dewars. And if you want to get in touch with us here at the Entrepreneurs, you can email Laura on lrkonocle.com I'm Tom Edwards. Goodbye and thanks for listening to Eureka.