“Bamboo fibre” bowls made with plastic for a recent trend: Not just not biodegradable as the name suggests, but also not recyclable.
Like “vegan leather” (made from processed crude oil), these terms only seem to take us away from the products that we are actually looking for when something says “natural”.
I think it would be fair to call this wood fiber reinforced epoxy sheets.
Same reason we use MDF rather than Medium-density fibreboard.
Honestly, the manufacturing process sounds much simpler than other “wood” I’ve seen that has much more engineering / chemicals involved.
Thankfully we have had similar naming laws around the “wood” you mention. They are not perfect, but they are enough if you know what you’re looking for.
Ultimately this is about material science and the various trade-offs inherent in each choice. Cedar-strip canoes have a highly valued aesthetic quality but "wood-strengthened epoxy" is an accurate description of the material; the epoxy, however, is not the distinguishing feature of cedar-strip, kevlar, nor fiberglass canoes.
Like all evolving innovations, "transparent wood" seems to be searching for its killer application and I don't expect the name used by researchers to continue if/when it finds product-market fit.
> Scientists develop transparent wood that is stronger and lighter than glass
That’s the article title, and it’s very easy to argue that they are looking to misappropriate the “wood = natural (and renewable) resource” properties. The current HN title from the paper even goes a step further by pairing it with “Solar-assisted fabrication“.
The normal bleaching process is quite energy intensive, so that is also a win.
No. If it's not 100% all natural it's green-washing.
Secondly that’s not the point.
Glass is a very energy consuming process, it’s heavy and a PITA to transport and it’s also a very good heat conductor which means for insulation you need to use multiple glass sheets with an air barrier.
This material is lighter, it’s a way to sequester carbon, it seems to be less energy intensive both to produce and transport and provides better insulation from the get go.
If this can be developed as a drop in replacement for window glass alone it can likely save a lot of energy both in the manufacturing and then in the heating of homes.
Even if it’s not biodegradable not everything needs to be, most glass isn’t recycled either, and it’s not like glass recycling is a particularly cheap process.
The glass from your glass recycling bin is usually just crushed and added as a filler to other materials not melted to make new glass.
As long as a significant portion of the material is from plants, rather than fossil origin, it's probably still an improvement.
Plastic used in long-life consumer goods is generally not recycled anyway (as opposed to the single-use PETE, HDPE, etc, plastics used in packaging).
At least a fully plastic cup made of a single plastic could theoretically be recycled easily. When you embed it now has to have specific processes to deal with that before being recycled, and those processes might have to be specific to that one product (or at worst: the process becomes “burn out all the impurities, throw the smoke in the air”)
Sure. But it's much more environmentally efficient in terms of water use, carbon emissions, etc if we can make sufficiently tasty and nutritious foods directly from plants rather than going through the inefficient animal step. Many people also have ethical objections to consuming animals.