It’s finally getting easier to upgrade your phones and other devices. With plans like AT&T’s Next, T-Mobile’s JUMP (acronymic for “Just Upgrade My Phone”), Sprint’s Unlimited Plus Plan, and Verizon’s Edge lineup, it’s much easier to abandon an older phone for the next big thing. And after that old device runs its course, it will end up in a landfill, to become absorbed into the earth. According to IEEE Spectrum, 426,000 phones and 112,000 computers are discarded daily in the US, for a total of 3.2 million tons of electronic waste annually.

Most portable electronics, however, are comprised of toxic materials such as gallium arsenide and others that work against the environment instead of for it — and that’s despite a recent push toward so-called greener devices that are easier to recycle. Now University of Madison-Wisconsin (UMW) professor Zhenqiang “Jack” Ma and his team have published a paper in Nature Communications proposing a surprising material from which to manufacture semiconductor chips: CNF, or cellulose nanofibril, a polymer ingredient used to create wood. The development of CNF from wood can be traced back to the 1980s. CNF, once extracted, can be made into some form of flexible nanopaper that will eventually dissolve back into the earth without any negative environmental effects.

Trees are often scaled down to microfibers that are used to build paper — but that further scaling down to a “nano” size could make CNF “very strong and transparent CNF paper,” according to FPL project leader Zhiyong Cai. CNF is a pseudo-plastic fluid that becomes gel-like at high temperatures, but viscous when shaken or disturbed. The wood ingredient is used already in not only paper and board, but also in barbecue sauce, Sargento and organic cheese, carrots, pears, bananas, potatoes, wheat straw, paints, food packaging, bamboo, soy hulls, and sunscreen. Using it in chips could lead not just to biodegradable devices, but aid in the development of flexible electronics for wearables, phones, and other kinds of suitable products.

The Earth-friendliness of CNF is an advantage of the ingredient as opposed to toxic materials. But CNF doesn’t come without other concerns – one being CNF’s susceptibility to expansion and shrinking when in contact with the elements due to its hydroscopic nature. To buttress CNF’s element-resistance, Ma and his team added epoxy coating, a water-resistant, acid-resistant, and solvent-resistant solution to the small semiconductor chip. Aalto University and North Carolina State University produced a water-resistant, durable CNF gel-like film for porous plates in 2013 that can be used for at-home medical tests, which would allow the porous plate to turn a certain color in the case of sickness, disease, or infection.

UMW’s Professor Ma and his research team are paving the way for Google’s Project Ara, a major research undertaking to create a modular smartphone that lets consumers swap out old parts for new ones as preference mandates. With Ma’s discovery of CNF as a more environmentally friendly ingredient for mobile chips and the rise of solar energy-powered batteries, perhaps the thing Google’s project really needs is a more biodegradable slant.