- Transparent wood takes wood, dissolves the lignin (natural wood glue-ish) with a solvent, and replaces it with epoxy under pressure. It's a pain to make, but is very cool and preserves the wood fibre structure.

- This transparent paper involves dissolving very pure cellulose (long starch) and then allowing it to reconnect tightly (with heat) before drying. It appears to be composed primarily of cellulose at the end and exhibits plastic properties. I presume the chemicals change the cellulose properties to allow this.

"lithium bromide-water" is (apparently, I was corrected) not very toxic and lilley recycled in the process. If this can be scaled and the solvent process can be done safely, then its very clever. It's effectively plastic but using a more "natural" carbon chain, which nature has had a few million extra years to figure out how to break down.

They describe it as paper and compare it to polycarbonate... so my guess is that it is a bit brittle, and cannot nicely replace plastic wrap or plastic bags... but it has some nice properties to replace a group of plastics we don't have very good alternatives to. One open question I have is UV resistance. Most transparent plastics tend to become brittle over time... but I don't know my chemistry enough to know if cellulose has the same issue. Greenhouses would otherwise benefit from it (as they're often made from polycarbonate sheets rather than glass)