Plastics are pretty much everywhere in the modern world including places we want them to be and places where we don’t. Conventional plastics are not biodegradable and instead cause increasing problems wherever they end up after their useful life. As a result, there are global efforts to find environmentally friendly replacements for petroleum-based plastics.
An interesting candidate for replacing many types of plastic is transparent wood. Transparent wood is a man-made material derived from natural wood. Wood has three components: cellulose, hemicellulose, and lignin. Transparent wood is created by removing the lignin and hemicellulose, leaving behind a porous, paper-like network of cellulose. It is transparent but lacks structural strength. In the past, clear materials like epoxies have been added to produce a strong, transparent material: transparent wood. But because of the epoxy – itself a form of plastic – the resultant material was non-biodegradable.
Researchers at Kennesaw State University in Georgia have developed a method for producing transparent wood that replaces epoxies with an egg white and rice extract mixture along with a curing agent called diethylenetriamine. The end product is a semi-transparent form of wood that is biodegradable.
The researchers also incorporated silver nanowires into samples of their transparent wood. This enabled the wood to conduct electricity and could be useful in wearable sensors or as coatings for solar cells. There is additional research needed to improve the properties of this transparent wood, but a plastic replacement made from natural and inexpensive materials could be quite valuable.
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Making sturdy, semi-transparent wood with cheap, natural materials
Photo, posted August 1, 2017, courtesy of NOAA Marine Debris via Flickr.
Earth Wise is a production of WAMC Northeast Public Radio
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