A multitude of materials are used to create all kinds of objects, elements and even houses, and the wood could give way forward under a future transparent wood that is already being used, and is much more ecological and sustainable than, for example, plastic.
And it is that transparent wood is already part of our present, but it could be the standard of the future, a new material that researchers have been testing for quite some time, and that could be a way of offering much more sustainable wood for the subject of constructions or the creation of objects.
So this new material could be the main protagonist of future constructions such as houses, in a transparent wood that, although it has been used for a few years now, is now being taken much further and more thanks to these latest scientific advances .
And now a team of researchers has found that biodegradable and renewable alternative to glass and plastic in the form of this advanced transparent wood, one of those new materials that could end up being used by human beings to make our society more sustainable.
And it is that this new material could greatly reduce the ecological impact of construction materials that are more harmful to the environment such as glass and plastic.
This breakthrough is detailed in a new study to be published in the journal Science of The Total Environment.
“Transparent wood as a material can replace environmentally harmful petroleum-based plastics, such as polypropylene, polyvinyl chloride (PVC), acrylic, polyethylene, etc.“, it states Prodyut Dharstudy author and professor at the Indian Institute of Technology in Delhi.
It is not a new material
As we said, this material is not new, since it was invented by the scientist Siegfried Fink in 1992, but it has undergone various changes and improvements in recent years.
To create this transparent wood material it is first manufactured by removing a natural polymer called lignin from the wood and replacing it with specially designed transparent plastic materials.
“Plastics are used as a substitute for glass, which is naturally brittle“, says Dhar. “However, transparent wood is an even better alternative from an ecological perspective, as seen in our life cycle analysis.“.
However, it should be clarified that this new material will not replace glass or plastic in its entirety in the short term, since scientists have to figure out how to increase their production in an economical way.
“In recent times, transparent wood has been used in construction, energy storage, flexible electronics, and packaging applications, but given growing concerns about the environmental impact of petroleum-based plastic materials, transparent wood has a role in maintaining environmental sustainability“, points out Anish Chatthothprofessor at Kerala Agricultural University.
In this way, transparent wood could be that material that we would be expecting to be totally sustainable and efficient for the constructions of the future.