3DWOOD - Printable wood to replace plastics [composite wood materials with novel properties made using inducible stem-cell cultures glued together using natural lignin]

Climate change is the biggest challenge that Sweden and the world are now facing. To cope and possibly revert climate change, we need to reduce our footprint on the environment.

This reduction of human impact requires new alternative and sustainable technologies to replace the old polluting fossil-fuel dependent ones.

This is particularly the case in our everyday consumption of products made from plastics.In the course of the present project, we will develop a sustainable production system to replace plastics.

This new technology will use 0% fossil-fuel and 100% non-GMO stem cell cultures similarly to recent developments for meat and leather made without breeding or killing animals: our technology will instead produce new castable plant woody materials. Sweden and the applicant are currently the world leader in plant stem cell culture technology.

The applicant has developed the most stable system and used it continuously for the past 12-years for basic research.

Based on its reliability, it is now time to extend the uses of this “made in Sweden” state-of-the-art technology into an alternative to plastics in the manufacturing of objects.

The proposed project thus aims to combine (i) the capacity of stem cell cultures to make wood cells that can then self-assembled by making lignin with (ii) 3D printing to make a flexible production system. This novel technology will then be used for high-end products of Swedish design.