Transparent Wood

A team of researchers claims to have created a biodegradable and renewable alternative to both glass and plastic in the form of "transparent wood," a futuristic new material that could greatly reduce the ecological impact of more environmentally-unfriendly building materials. The material, which was invented by German scientist Siegfried Fink in 1992, has seen several changes and improvements over the intervening years. It's made by first removing a naturally occurring polymer called lignin from wood and replacing it with specially-designed, transparent plastic materials. Plastics are used as a substitute for glass which is (naturally) fragile," Dhar said. "However, transparent wood is an even better alternative from an ecological perspective as observed in our life-cycle analysis. In recent times transparent wood has been used in construction, energy storage, flexible electronics, and packaging applications. But it won't be replacing glass and plastic in their entirety anytime soon because scientists have yet to figure out how to scale up production of the material in an economical way.