Transparent wood is cool, but imho it's a solution in search for a problem. As the article explains, you basically remove the lignin, bleach it, and fill in the spaces with epoxy. What you get is neither as clear as pure epoxy or glass, nor as environmentally friendly as wood since now it's more plastic than wood by weight.
The material having more flex than glass or plexiglas gives it more impact resistance, so maybe there the phone screen use-case is plausible. But then you have to deal with the visible wood structure, and colors won't be as vibrant as they would be with a glass screen.
A house I lived in for a while had one room where all the interior panes were plexiglass. It wasn't that clear (they'd been significantly scuffed up) and there were some cracks at the edges that had been half heartedly sealed.
When asking a neighbor about it, that room was a child's room who in their younger years had tantrums and would throw things at the window. After the glass windows were replaced a couple times (once in the winter which was pricy for a "need to fix this today"), the parents replaced the windows with a rather durable plexiglass. They didn't break again, but they got scuffed up until the child outgrew the tantrums and the house was later sold.
Having something that is potentially more energy efficient (lower thermal transmission) and more durable are existing problems that this could provide a solution or a direction for future solutions.
Love stories like this that unintentionally show how hard parenting is. I guarantee a big share of non parents are thinking “I would simply stop the bad behavior or would have never let it start to begin with”
On the other hand, non-parents read stories like this and assume it's common behavior, or that all children are like this.
A child who throws tantrums and breaks windows would be a parenting challenge indeed and it's not as simple as blaming the parents, but to be clear a situation like this (child breaks windows on a routine basis) would be rather rare.
I’m a parent of two mostly grown boys, one of which was diagnosed with ADHD at a young age, so he definitely had behaviors at a young age that were challenging.
But even I’m having a hard time rationalizing that replacing windows with plexiglass was the first solution that worked. It seems like there are a number of other things that would’ve helped without having to go to that extreme.
But I do get it — every child is different, and every parent has different methods for approaching challenges.
Just saying that this feels extreme, even from the perspective of another parent.
I didn't read the story as the plexiglass working for anything other than eliminating recurring bills of replacing windows. Clearly, the tantrums did not stop as the plexi was all scratched up. So to me, your hard time rationalizing is probably because it's not something that needs doing. Sometimes, you have to stop the bleeding before you can fix the actual issue.
It makes a lot of sense to me. If a kid keeps breaking something, stop giving it to him.
Kids (and adults) often have an impulse to make problems worse once they know they are in trouble. If they don’t have the opportunity to do that then there is a shorter path to calm down and talk.
Like if you know your kid cheated on a test, don’t ask them if they cheated and give them a chance to lie. Just start by saying you know they cheated and why.
Most parents would tell you that having a child learn how to deny satisfaction is a huge detriment. If they learn it from a parent it’s almost impossible to constructively address.
Can you restate that for me, because the way I read it, you are saying that if you teach a child how to deny satisfaction it is a negative.
I think there is evidence to show that children who can't delay/deny satisfaction end up making significantly poorer life choices and have worse lives.
Anecdotally, every teenager I knew who couldn't accept delayed/denied satisfaction were absolute shits.
Definitely. I appreciate when someone asks for clarity.
The part I was talking about was “denying the child the satisfaction” as in the parent intentionally frustrating the child to teach them a lesson. I tried to take a shortcut by using the same wording as the person I replied to but I can see how that made it unclear.
The point I meant to make is that if a parent uses that technique to teach lessons in that way it’s likely that the child learns to use that technique themselves and turn it on the parent.
Further: If a child learns this type of technique from a parent it can be very hard to stop them from using it.
Put me in the "ever let it start to begin with" camp, because I'm never having kids. That shit looks hard as all hell.
Having a kid that smashes windows when told to go to its room sounds like the kind of soul draining thing that causes relationships to end. Huge props to those parents for navigating through that.
And a big share of parents are thinking “this is a really smart solution!”
“Bad behaviors” are almost always rooted in chronically unmet needs, over/under stimulation, hypersensitivity, general lack of control, sibling jealousy etc etc.
its a good idea to treat them as symptoms to investigate rather than ”behaviors” to eliminate.
Thermal conductivity isn't really relevant in window glazing materials, because nearly all of the insulation is provided by the argon in a double (or triple, or quadruple) glazing unit. Most of the recent advances in efficiency have come from improving the thermal conductivity of the frame and the use of low emissivity coatings to reduce infrared transmission.
Regarding the embodied energy, I think that the reduced durability of basically anything that isn't glass will prove fatal in most applications. We abandoned plastic smartphone screens for a reason. A glass screen might crack if you're careless, but a plastic screen will become severely scuffed in normal use.
> A glass screen might crack if you're careless, but a plastic screen will become severely scuffed in normal use.
Smartphone "glass" scratches pretty well too. Not that it's visible in daily use unless you look for it tho. Better have "scratched" screen than cracked screen IMO.
I've had very good luck with the tempered glass screen protectors and a cheap case thusfar. Broken a few of the protectors, mostly dropping my phone in parking lots, never had the screen actually break when I was using one.
Also, additional upside is, any scratches are on the glass protector, so, if you get a particularly bothersome one, you can just replace the glass and you're back to brand new for way cheaper than a new screen.
> The material having more flex than glass or plexiglas gives it more impact resistance, so maybe there the phone screen use-case is plausible
I'm not sure I buy that, there's lots of materials that are more transparent than this "transparent" wood that can flex. Polycarbonate is a great example of this. So transparent we make most of our eye glasses out of it, durable and impact resistant we call water bottles made out of it "unbreakable" but we don't use it in phones.
> Flat or float glass plants (NAICS 327211) operate high temperature furnaces that melt siliceous minerals and other materials to produce glass typically used in windows, glazing, and windshields. Glass manufacturing is energy intensive and a significant source of greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions from the industrial sector. Emissions from plants producing flat glass are the largest source of GHG emissions in the manufacturing lifecycle of products made with flat glass. In 2019, 22 flat glass plants reported direct emissions of 2.95 million metric tons of carbon dioxide equivalents (CO2e) to the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA). Emissions from these plants represent nearly 70% of total direct emissions from flat glass industry.
One advantage of glass is that it's infinitely recyclable.
Wood+epoxy is probably a nightmare to recycle and will just end up in dumps and further contributing to the microplastic problem our world faces. Maybe it's fine. Maybe in 50 years we'll look back on the idea the same way we would if somebody made walls and phone parts of wood mixed with asbestos and lead.
For the recyclability of glass - absolutely. But when we're dealing with windows for houses, while they are recyclable, we're not talking about the glass bottle cycle (wine bottles, beer bottles, soda bottles), but rather windows that tend to be on the 10 year (or longer) length of time.
The recyclability of the house that I currently reside in (different house) has windows that are at least 40 years old (and possibly some that are at least 80). The most recent ones were some done about 20 years ago, and I've got no intention of replacing them (they work quite well).
Glass is recyclable and I wholly advocate its use for bottles and the like.
But how old are the windows in your house? When you replace them - will they be recycled or thrown out with other structural construction waste? When your garage door gets replaced (that's 30 years old), will you separate out the three one foot square windows from that top panel and send that separately to the recycling center? Or will it all get tossed in the large garbage hauler?
I'm not saying that this is good, but rather that the use case for glass (or similar material) for a window in construction tends to have a different life cycle than the wine bottle.
I was replying to wood being a carbon sink being relevant. You are right that the point of comparison should be on the whole process on both sides. Wood being a carbon sink is a component in that, but I doubt that it's hugely relevant.
That quote about absolute emissions doesn't tell me much. The link has a much more useful metric: ~0.55 tons of CO2 per ton of produced flat glass. This is the number that a new process is competing with.
Another consideration is longevity. The rate of amortization acts as a multiplier for carbon footprint. It's hard to compete with glass in this area too.
A biodegradable window in a building wouldn't be much use, you'd have to replace it constantly each time it rotted away. Except maybe in a very dry climate.
I suppose you could paint it, if we also had transparent paint. Well, there are lacquers.
Biodegradation is very much a function of conditions. Wood is biodegradable, but a well built house can avoid biodegradation for hundreds of years. Wood-framed windows are just fine with, in my experience, two caveats:
1. Rainwater needs to drain, even from gnarly little spaces like where the glass meets the wood. If the exterior wood is painted, then the paint needs to be maintained.
2. Interior humidity can and will condense onto the glass if the interior dewpoint is higher than the surface temperature. This can be hard to avoid in cold climates, especially if there are insulating window coverings over the glass. That condensation can drip onto the wood frame. (And, worse, could go through it into the wall cavity. It’s rather rare for the inside of a wall to be waterproofed and flashed like the outside ought to be.)
If I were building in a cold climate, I would stick with moisture-insensitive window frames. (Although aluminum, which can be quite pretty, has terrible thermal performance.)
Yeah, I'm familiar with these issues, living in a 70-year-old hardwood framed and clad house with decaying paint in a wet climate. I'm renovating it gradually.
I agree, this sounds like a dumb idea for the applications listed. For a display screen, you want something that is perfectly clear, and this doesn't sound like it will be. It'll either have visible fibers, which no one wants on their phone screen, or at best it'll have reduced transmitivity, which means you'll need to increase the OLED/backlight brightness to compensate, which means the battery life will be bad.
It sounds like a good idea for some other applications, such as lampshades, or some places where plexiglass is used; places where you don't need (or even want) perfectly-clear glass, and the strength of wood fibers can be a big asset.
The material having more flex than glass or plexiglas gives it more impact resistance, so maybe there the phone screen use-case is plausible. But then you have to deal with the visible wood structure, and colors won't be as vibrant as they would be with a glass screen.