Miniature furniture 3D printed using ink made from recycled wood
A miniature chair and table 3D printed from waste woodThakur et al., Sci. Adv. 10, eadk3250 (2024)
Recycled wood can be turned into an ink for 3D printing, which could offer a more sustainable way to manufacture furniture or even build houses.
“Wood has been used for building and structural purposes for centuries,” says Muhammad Rahman at Rice University in Texas. But working with the material isn’t especially efficient, as chiselling it down to size can result in lots of waste.
To make use of this leftover material, Rahman and his colleagues split it into lignin and cellulose – molecules that are key to the stiff structure of wood – and these were broken down to form nanofibres and nanocrystals. They then recombined the cellulose and lignin with water to make a ...