Would you be surprised that some shoes now contain wood? Technology is allowing more and more ways to utilize wood in different products. Let’s look at some different products made from wood that didn’t exist ten years ago.
Xylitol-sweetened gum
This is a birch-based sweetener that is used in some gums and has been found to fight tooth decay.
Footwear
Allbirds is a San Francisco-based shoe company that utilizes wood-fiber in their shoes. They have a goal of seventy-five percent of their materials being sourced from natural or recycled sources.
Tires
Tire maker Michelin’s engineers found a way to use paper-mill waste to make stretchy elastomer compounds to use in tires.
Fully transparent windowpanes
Researchers at the Universities of Maryland and Colorado have teamed up with private industry and made wooden “glass”. It is five times more thermally efficient than regular glass (conventional glass is a poor insulator allowing heat and cold into structures). It is nearly shatter-proof. And it uses less energy to make and is based on a renewable resource.
Super wood (densified Wood)
Super wood is made by removing lignin from wood (the lignin makes wood rigid) and then compressing it under mild heat of one hundred-fifty degrees Fahrenheit. This process makes the cellulose fibers more tightly packed reducing the superwood to one fifth its original thickness but increasing its strength by twelve times and its toughness by ten times. This makes it a competitor with steel or titanium alloys.
Wooden satellites
Kyoto University in Japan sent a wooden satellite into orbit. The benefit is that it burns up when re-entering earth’s atmosphere verses breaking into alumina micro-specks as a conventional satellite. If it does break up in space the wood splinters are less dangerous than the nuts, bolts and metal shards from conventional space objects.
Packing tape
A University of Delaware team has developed low-cost adhesives from natural polymers found in lignin, a portion of wood that makes a tree rigid.
The information for this blog came from this article.
Stay tuned for more new wood products in Unusual wood products Part 2.
