Transparent wood, made by stripping organic polymers and replacing them with a mixture of egg whites and rice extract, could be used as windows and smartphone screens
By Matthew Sparkes
26 March 2025
A birdhouse with a window made of transparent wood placed by a heat lamp to test the thermal properties of the material
Bharat Baruah et al. (2025)
Windows and smartphone screens may one day be constructed from transparent wood laced with egg whites and safely composted at the end of their life.
Researchers are interested in using wood to make biodegradable alternatives to glass with better insulating properties, or to replace plastic in electronic devices. Wood has been turned into a transparent material before by modifying or removing the organic polymer lignin from it and then injecting epoxy as a replacement, but this results in a non-biodegradable product.
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We have discovered an entirely new kind of wood
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Now Bharat Baruah at Kennesaw State University in Georgia and his colleagues have developed a process that replaces the synthetic epoxy with natural egg white and rice extract.
“[Previous examples of transparent wood are] very hard to synthesise, hard to make and you spend a lot of time and energy and money to make those, so that’s why we thought about creating something that we can make easily and naturally,” says Baruah.
He was inspired to use egg whites by buildings in his home state of Assam in India, which date back to the 1500s and use a cement-like mixture that included sand, sticky rice and egg whites. “That was the cement in those days, and those buildings are still there,” says Baruah. “They’re still there after more than four or five centuries and it was always fascinating to me.”