“It’s also the largest part of the electronics and has the lowest value, so if you have certain chips on it that actually have a high value, you might want to recycle them.”AdvertisementKaltenbrunner and his colleagues have now tried using skin from the mushroom Ganoderma lucidum to act as a biodegradable electronic substrate.If kept away from moisture and UV light, the skin could probably last for hundreds of years, says Kaltenbrunner, so would be fine for the lifetime of an electronic device.The substrate remains effective even after bending it more than 2000 times, and the researchers demonstrated that it could also work in a basic battery for low-power devices like Bluetooth sensors.“The prototypes produced are impressive and the results are groundbreaking,” says Andrew Adamatzky at the University of the West of England in Bristol, UK.Combining the dead mycelium skin with patches of living fungal material being developed for possible applications as sensory skin for adaptive buildings and robots could help develop wearable fungal devices, he says."