#cellulose

Sawdust-Based Foam Could Offer a Sustainable Alternative to Polystyrene

Waste swept off a sawmill floor, plant-based binders, and beeswax create foams with potential for sustainable packaging and building materials.

Newswise — Polystyrene — common in packing peanuts and box inserts — is manufactured from fossil fuels. To develop a sustainable alternative, researchers reporting in ACS Applied Polymer Materials tested an unconventional starting material: sawdust. Their prototype foams incorporated cellulose binders and other additives to form rigid or flexible materials, and some versions matched polystyrene’s strength and impact resistance. A simple beeswax coating made them water-resistant, producing biobased foams with potential for packaging and building materials.  “It can be exciting to use waste products as a starting point for materials fabrication, rather than a chemical catalog,” says Todd Emrick, the corresponding author of the study. He adds that the first author of the paper, Isha Farook, drove to nearby farms and sawmills asking if the research team could have their sawdust waste. Both researchers were pleased and surprised that, once it was dried, this waste sawdust created well-performing foams. 

"Lapso"

The Lapso lamp is crafted from bacterial cellulose, a material produced through the fermentation of specific bacteria. Unlike traditional plastics or even paper, bacterial cellulose is both biodegradable and highly versatile.

The lamp’s unique translucent quality comes from the thin, layered sheets of this material, which naturally diffuse light in a soft and soothing way.

Each lamp is handmade, with the cellulose grown in controlled conditions to achieve the desired texture and transparency.

When illuminated, the lamp takes on an ethereal glow that enhances any room with a sense of warmth and natural beauty.

An international team of biotechnologists and evolutionary specialists has discovered three types of bacteria in the human gut that help to break down cellulose. In their project, reported in the journal Science, the group studied the genomes of bacteria found in human and ruminates. For many years, it was believed that the modern human diet had rid the gut of the ability to digest cellulose (the prime component of plant cell walls). But in 2003, a team of researchers discovered a cellulose-eating bacteria in human fecal samples. Since that study, it has not been known whether there are more types of bacteria in the human gut capable of aiding in digesting plant material. In this new study, the research team conducted an exhaustive study of gut bacteria genomes.