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Transparent wood is cool, but imho it's a solution in search for a problem. As the article explains, you basically remove the lignin, bleach it, and fill in the

Transparent wood is cool, but imho it's a solution in search for a problem. As the article explains, you basically remove the lignin, bleach it, and fill in the spaces with epoxy. What you get is neither as clear as pure epoxy or glass, nor as environmentally friendly as wood since now it's more plastic than wood by weight. The material having more flex than glass or plexiglas gives it more impact resistance, so maybe there the phone screen use-case is plausible. But then you have to deal with the visible wood structure, and colors won't be as vibrant as they would be with a glass screen.

bootsmann 3y ago
Wood is a carbon sink, if you look at the page of Woodoo, one of the startups mentioned in the article, sustainability seems to be a key pitch.
- deleted 3y ago
  [deleted]
- leni536 3y ago
  I wouldn't be surprised if turning a piece of wood transparent would have orders of magnitude more carbon footprint than just burning it.
  - shagie 3y ago
    What is the carbon footprint of the glass that it replaces, and the lifetime lower costs of heating / cooling because of lower thermal conductivity? This isn't a simple "cost of process to make it vs amount of C related if burnt". And there are efforts to make glass lower carbon footprint too ( https://www.psu.edu/news/research/story/new-glass-cuts-carbon-footprint-nearly-half-and-10x-more-damage-resistant/ https://www.psu.edu/news/research/story/new-glass-cuts-carbo... ) https://www.epa.gov/system/files/documents/2022-06/2019%20Flat%20Glass%20Plant%20Carbon%20Intensities%20Fact%20Sheet.pdf https://www.epa.gov/system/files/documents/2022-06/2019%20Fl... is what its competing against. > Flat or float glass plants (NAICS 327211) operate high temperature furnaces that melt siliceous minerals and other materials to produce glass typically used in windows, glazing, and windshields. Glass manufacturing is energy intensive and a significant source of greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions from the industrial sector. Emissions from plants producing flat glass are the largest source of GHG emissions in the manufacturing lifecycle of products made with flat glass. In 2019, 22 flat glass plants reported direct emissions of 2.95 million metric tons of carbon dioxide equivalents (CO2e) to the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA). Emissions from these plants represent nearly 70% of total direct emissions from flat glass industry.
    - justworkout 3y ago
      One advantage of glass is that it's infinitely recyclable. Wood+epoxy is probably a nightmare to recycle and will just end up in dumps and further contributing to the microplastic problem our world faces. Maybe it's fine. Maybe in 50 years we'll look back on the idea the same way we would if somebody made walls and phone parts of wood mixed with asbestos and lead.
      - shagie 3y ago
        For the recyclability of glass - absolutely. But when we're dealing with windows for houses, while they are recyclable, we're not talking about the glass bottle cycle (wine bottles, beer bottles, soda bottles), but rather windows that tend to be on the 10 year (or longer) length of time. The recyclability of the house that I currently reside in (different house) has windows that are at least 40 years old (and possibly some that are at least 80). The most recent ones were some done about 20 years ago, and I've got no intention of replacing them (they work quite well). Glass is recyclable and I wholly advocate its use for bottles and the like. But how old are the windows in your house? When you replace them - will they be recycled or thrown out with other structural construction waste? When your garage door gets replaced (that's 30 years old), will you separate out the three one foot square windows from that top panel and send that separately to the recycling center? Or will it all get tossed in the large garbage hauler? I'm not saying that this is good, but rather that the use case for glass (or similar material) for a window in construction tends to have a different life cycle than the wine bottle.
      - thsksbd 3y ago
        Burn it in a high temperature oven
    - leni536 3y ago
      I was replying to wood being a carbon sink being relevant. You are right that the point of comparison should be on the whole process on both sides. Wood being a carbon sink is a component in that, but I doubt that it's hugely relevant. That quote about absolute emissions doesn't tell me much. The link has a much more useful metric: ~0.55 tons of CO2 per ton of produced flat glass. This is the number that a new process is competing with. Another consideration is longevity. The rate of amortization acts as a multiplier for carbon footprint. It's hard to compete with glass in this area too.
- robbiep 3y ago
  What about the resin though? It’s not recyclable (or décomposable) surely?
  - teucris 3y ago
    Yes, they call out that glass has a lower end-of-life impact, eg glass turns into sand.
  - incompatible 3y ago
    A biodegradable window in a building wouldn't be much use, you'd have to replace it constantly each time it rotted away. Except maybe in a very dry climate. I suppose you could paint it, if we also had transparent paint. Well, there are lacquers.
    - amluto 3y ago
      Biodegradation is very much a function of conditions. Wood is biodegradable, but a well built house can avoid biodegradation for hundreds of years. Wood-framed windows are just fine with, in my experience, two caveats: 1. Rainwater needs to drain, even from gnarly little spaces like where the glass meets the wood. If the exterior wood is painted, then the paint needs to be maintained. 2. Interior humidity can and will condense onto the glass if the interior dewpoint is higher than the surface temperature. This can be hard to avoid in cold climates, especially if there are insulating window coverings over the glass. That condensation can drip onto the wood frame. (And, worse, could go through it into the wall cavity. It’s rather rare for the inside of a wall to be waterproofed and flashed like the outside ought to be.) If I were building in a cold climate, I would stick with moisture-insensitive window frames. (Although aluminum, which can be quite pretty, has terrible thermal performance.)
      - incompatible 3y ago
        Yeah, I'm familiar with these issues, living in a 70-year-old hardwood framed and clad house with decaying paint in a wet climate. I'm renovating it gradually.
malfist 3y ago
> The material having more flex than glass or plexiglas gives it more impact resistance, so maybe there the phone screen use-case is plausible I'm not sure I buy that, there's lots of materials that are more transparent than this "transparent" wood that can flex. Polycarbonate is a great example of this. So transparent we make most of our eye glasses out of it, durable and impact resistant we call water bottles made out of it "unbreakable" but we don't use it in phones.
- teucris 3y ago
  Polycarbonate scratches easily. Making a composite means the resin can be more brittle, eg scratch resistant, while having more flex.
shagie 3y ago
A house I lived in for a while had one room where all the interior panes were plexiglass. It wasn't that clear (they'd been significantly scuffed up) and there were some cracks at the edges that had been half heartedly sealed. When asking a neighbor about it, that room was a child's room who in their younger years had tantrums and would throw things at the window. After the glass windows were replaced a couple times (once in the winter which was pricy for a "need to fix this today"), the parents replaced the windows with a rather durable plexiglass. They didn't break again, but they got scuffed up until the child outgrew the tantrums and the house was later sold. Having something that is potentially more energy efficient (lower thermal transmission) and more durable are existing problems that this could provide a solution or a direction for future solutions. (older articles) https://www.usda.gov/media/blog/2020/10/01/transparent-wood-could-be-window-future https://www.usda.gov/media/blog/2020/10/01/transparent-wood-... and https://web.archive.org/web/20201006210438/https://www.fpl.fs.fed.us/documnts/pdf2020/fpl_2020_mi001.pdf https://web.archive.org/web/20201006210438/https://www.fpl.f...
- encoderer 3y ago
  Love stories like this that unintentionally show how hard parenting is. I guarantee a big share of non parents are thinking “I would simply stop the bad behavior or would have never let it start to begin with”
  - jader201 3y ago
    I’m a parent of two mostly grown boys, one of which was diagnosed with ADHD at a young age, so he definitely had behaviors at a young age that were challenging. But even I’m having a hard time rationalizing that replacing windows with plexiglass was the first solution that worked. It seems like there are a number of other things that would’ve helped without having to go to that extreme. But I do get it — every child is different, and every parent has different methods for approaching challenges. Just saying that this feels extreme, even from the perspective of another parent.
    - bagful 3y ago
shiroiuma 3y ago
I agree, this sounds like a dumb idea for the applications listed. For a display screen, you want something that is perfectly clear, and this doesn't sound like it will be. It'll either have visible fibers, which no one wants on their phone screen, or at best it'll have reduced transmitivity, which means you'll need to increase the OLED/backlight brightness to compensate, which means the battery life will be bad. It sounds like a good idea for some other applications, such as lampshades, or some places where plexiglass is used; places where you don't need (or even want) perfectly-clear glass, and the strength of wood fibers can be a big asset.

bootsmann 3y ago

Wood is a carbon sink, if you look at the page of Woodoo, one of the startups mentioned in the article, sustainability seems to be a key pitch.

deleted 3y ago
[deleted]
leni536 3y ago
I wouldn't be surprised if turning a piece of wood transparent would have orders of magnitude more carbon footprint than just burning it.
- shagie 3y ago
  What is the carbon footprint of the glass that it replaces, and the lifetime lower costs of heating / cooling because of lower thermal conductivity? This isn't a simple "cost of process to make it vs amount of C related if burnt". And there are efforts to make glass lower carbon footprint too ( https://www.psu.edu/news/research/story/new-glass-cuts-carbon-footprint-nearly-half-and-10x-more-damage-resistant/ https://www.psu.edu/news/research/story/new-glass-cuts-carbo... ) https://www.epa.gov/system/files/documents/2022-06/2019%20Flat%20Glass%20Plant%20Carbon%20Intensities%20Fact%20Sheet.pdf https://www.epa.gov/system/files/documents/2022-06/2019%20Fl... is what its competing against. > Flat or float glass plants (NAICS 327211) operate high temperature furnaces that melt siliceous minerals and other materials to produce glass typically used in windows, glazing, and windshields. Glass manufacturing is energy intensive and a significant source of greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions from the industrial sector. Emissions from plants producing flat glass are the largest source of GHG emissions in the manufacturing lifecycle of products made with flat glass. In 2019, 22 flat glass plants reported direct emissions of 2.95 million metric tons of carbon dioxide equivalents (CO2e) to the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA). Emissions from these plants represent nearly 70% of total direct emissions from flat glass industry.
  - justworkout 3y ago
    One advantage of glass is that it's infinitely recyclable. Wood+epoxy is probably a nightmare to recycle and will just end up in dumps and further contributing to the microplastic problem our world faces. Maybe it's fine. Maybe in 50 years we'll look back on the idea the same way we would if somebody made walls and phone parts of wood mixed with asbestos and lead.
    - shagie 3y ago
      For the recyclability of glass - absolutely. But when we're dealing with windows for houses, while they are recyclable, we're not talking about the glass bottle cycle (wine bottles, beer bottles, soda bottles), but rather windows that tend to be on the 10 year (or longer) length of time. The recyclability of the house that I currently reside in (different house) has windows that are at least 40 years old (and possibly some that are at least 80). The most recent ones were some done about 20 years ago, and I've got no intention of replacing them (they work quite well). Glass is recyclable and I wholly advocate its use for bottles and the like. But how old are the windows in your house? When you replace them - will they be recycled or thrown out with other structural construction waste? When your garage door gets replaced (that's 30 years old), will you separate out the three one foot square windows from that top panel and send that separately to the recycling center? Or will it all get tossed in the large garbage hauler? I'm not saying that this is good, but rather that the use case for glass (or similar material) for a window in construction tends to have a different life cycle than the wine bottle.
    - thsksbd 3y ago
      Burn it in a high temperature oven
  - leni536 3y ago
    I was replying to wood being a carbon sink being relevant. You are right that the point of comparison should be on the whole process on both sides. Wood being a carbon sink is a component in that, but I doubt that it's hugely relevant. That quote about absolute emissions doesn't tell me much. The link has a much more useful metric: ~0.55 tons of CO2 per ton of produced flat glass. This is the number that a new process is competing with. Another consideration is longevity. The rate of amortization acts as a multiplier for carbon footprint. It's hard to compete with glass in this area too.
robbiep 3y ago
What about the resin though? It’s not recyclable (or décomposable) surely?
- teucris 3y ago
  Yes, they call out that glass has a lower end-of-life impact, eg glass turns into sand.
- incompatible 3y ago
  A biodegradable window in a building wouldn't be much use, you'd have to replace it constantly each time it rotted away. Except maybe in a very dry climate. I suppose you could paint it, if we also had transparent paint. Well, there are lacquers.
  - amluto 3y ago
    Biodegradation is very much a function of conditions. Wood is biodegradable, but a well built house can avoid biodegradation for hundreds of years. Wood-framed windows are just fine with, in my experience, two caveats: 1. Rainwater needs to drain, even from gnarly little spaces like where the glass meets the wood. If the exterior wood is painted, then the paint needs to be maintained. 2. Interior humidity can and will condense onto the glass if the interior dewpoint is higher than the surface temperature. This can be hard to avoid in cold climates, especially if there are insulating window coverings over the glass. That condensation can drip onto the wood frame. (And, worse, could go through it into the wall cavity. It’s rather rare for the inside of a wall to be waterproofed and flashed like the outside ought to be.) If I were building in a cold climate, I would stick with moisture-insensitive window frames. (Although aluminum, which can be quite pretty, has terrible thermal performance.)
    - incompatible 3y ago
      Yeah, I'm familiar with these issues, living in a 70-year-old hardwood framed and clad house with decaying paint in a wet climate. I'm renovating it gradually.

malfist 3y ago

> The material having more flex than glass or plexiglas gives it more impact resistance, so maybe there the phone screen use-case is plausible I'm not sure I buy that, there's lots of materials that are more transparent than this "transparent" wood that can flex. Polycarbonate is a great example of this. So transparent we make most of our eye glasses out of it, durable and impact resistant we call water bottles made out of it "unbreakable" but we don't use it in phones.

teucris 3y ago
Polycarbonate scratches easily. Making a composite means the resin can be more brittle, eg scratch resistant, while having more flex.

shagie 3y ago

A house I lived in for a while had one room where all the interior panes were plexiglass. It wasn't that clear (they'd been significantly scuffed up) and there were some cracks at the edges that had been half heartedly sealed. When asking a neighbor about it, that room was a child's room who in their younger years had tantrums and would throw things at the window. After the glass windows were replaced a couple times (once in the winter which was pricy for a "need to fix this today"), the parents replaced the windows with a rather durable plexiglass. They didn't break again, but they got scuffed up until the child outgrew the tantrums and the house was later sold. Having something that is potentially more energy efficient (lower thermal transmission) and more durable are existing problems that this could provide a solution or a direction for future solutions. (older articles) https://www.usda.gov/media/blog/2020/10/01/transparent-wood-could-be-window-future https://www.usda.gov/media/blog/2020/10/01/transparent-wood-... and https://web.archive.org/web/20201006210438/https://www.fpl.fs.fed.us/documnts/pdf2020/fpl_2020_mi001.pdf https://web.archive.org/web/20201006210438/https://www.fpl.f...

encoderer 3y ago
Love stories like this that unintentionally show how hard parenting is. I guarantee a big share of non parents are thinking “I would simply stop the bad behavior or would have never let it start to begin with”
- jader201 3y ago
  I’m a parent of two mostly grown boys, one of which was diagnosed with ADHD at a young age, so he definitely had behaviors at a young age that were challenging. But even I’m having a hard time rationalizing that replacing windows with plexiglass was the first solution that worked. It seems like there are a number of other things that would’ve helped without having to go to that extreme. But I do get it — every child is different, and every parent has different methods for approaching challenges. Just saying that this feels extreme, even from the perspective of another parent.
  - bagful 3y ago

shiroiuma 3y ago

I agree, this sounds like a dumb idea for the applications listed. For a display screen, you want something that is perfectly clear, and this doesn't sound like it will be. It'll either have visible fibers, which no one wants on their phone screen, or at best it'll have reduced transmitivity, which means you'll need to increase the OLED/backlight brightness to compensate, which means the battery life will be bad. It sounds like a good idea for some other applications, such as lampshades, or some places where plexiglass is used; places where you don't need (or even want) perfectly-clear glass, and the strength of wood fibers can be a big asset.