Lars Berglund of the KTH Royal Institute of Technology in Sweden has developed what could very well be the next big trend in sustainable building: transparent wood. The material, which Berglund says can be mass-produced, is in fact an amalgam of wood and acrylic devised on the microscopic level. Stripped of lignin (the naturally occurring chemical that gives wood its brown coloring), a balsa veneer becomes considerably whiter, and with the addition of an acrylic polymer, the veneer then becomes 85 percent transparent. Researchers can adjust the level of transparency by changing the thickness of the wood veneer or the volume added of the acrylic polymer. The benefit, here, is that even at an altered transparency, the wood still exhibits its characteristic strength. This opens up new design possibilities: load-bearing wood windows, translucent exoskeletons, and sustainable solar panels, to name a few.

Berglund and his team at the institute’s Wallenberg Wood Science Center are currently developing a plywood composite using the same technique, and also intend to work with other varieties of wood. There’s a great ecological importance to shifting the construction and manufacturing sectors away from petroleum-based materials—Styrofoam, for example—and toward cellulose-based materials. Transparent wood may be a staple of a new set of renewable, biodegradable, naturally occurring wares and infrastructural building blocks.

The prototype is 85 percent transparent, but with further research, the team hopes to reach higher levels of transparency.

After optimizing the process, researchers may one day devise a wood composite that is stronger, thicker, and more transparent than these early prototypes. But there are still hurdles to jump before the material could be widely used. Transparent wood would likely be prohibitively expensive for use by laypeople: Industry movers and shakers would have to invest in mass-producing the wood before it can become affordable and readily available. The science still has a long way to go, but its development is promising.