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Biodegradable Fibers As Strong As Steel Made From Wood Cellulose
Zothecula writes "A team of researchers working at Stockholm's KTH Royal Institute of Technology claim to have developed a way to make cellulose fibers stronger than steel on a strength-to-weight basis. In what is touted as a world first, the team from the institute's Wallenberg Wood Science Center claim that the new fiber could be used as a biodegradable replacement for many filament materials made today from imperishable substances such as fiberglass, plastic, and metal. And all this from a substance that requires only water, wood cellulose, and common table salt to create it. The full academic paper is available from Nature Communications."
Most materials have advantages and disadvantages. Wood is an excellent material for many things and steel is a bad material for many things.
Unlike what many people believe carbon fiber (or other synthetic fibers like kevlar/aramid, dyneema, zylon) while stronger than steel are a bad material for many constructions as they often have a higher flexibility, higher sensitivity to things like UV radiation, abrasion etc. that have to be compensated for. This results in many products being worse than e.g. a steel construction but still being sold to the people that think it must be superior. Designing and using composites properly often is a very expensive process.
But again wood is an excellent material - it is flexible, strong (with natural fiber reinforcement), easy to form, renewable and reasonable priced. Even the above mentioned sensitivity of wet environments is easy to circumvent. There are a lot of natural wood which are naturally protected against water and other woods can easily be impregnated.