Coconut Wood Composites

Traditionally, valuable tropical woods has been used to make furniture and floorings. The Coconut tree is known to have many uses, from its roots to tips (leaves), from culinary to non-culinary consumer products, industrial products and medicinal products. To many around the world, the coconut tree is considered the “Tree of Life”. Palm trees used to be cut down at the end of their coconut-bearing years and replaced with new coconut palms. Only in recent years did people started researching on the use of the palm tree after it matures.

Coconut Wood Composites quality is comparable with the tropical woods specifically in terms of durability, sturdiness, and versatility. Its hardness and effectiveness are even at par with other hardwood timber that are more popular in the market like mahogany or oak. It has minimal shrinkage, bowing, or bending properties. Dutch manufacturer Kokoshout derived the name Cocodots due to the natural patterns that the wood has.

Neptune Balls

While sitting on the beach, trying to light a campfire covered with fibrous droplets, and not having any luck, Richard Meier, an American architect, wondered why the fire would not light? Upon further investigation, he realized it was extremely difficult to put fire to these strange fibrous globs that were lying around all over the beach, and this gave him the idea that would become NeptuTherm.

Instead of using materials like aluminium and polyester as roofs and walls insulator, NeptuTherm has developed a way of using a by-product of the sea, also known as Neptune balls, for insulation. Although written in Dutch, the photographs on this webpage clearly demonstrates how to lay this amazing material between the roof panels for insulation.

Further reading:

Seaweed fibers from Neptune balls
Building insulation for allergy sufferers
Production more resource efficient and climate-neutral quality technicalinsulation products - "Posidonia insulation"

NewspaperWood

Trees to wood to paper - paper to wood to useful objects! 

What can be more clever than recycling by reversing the line of production? Well, maybe not turning the paper into a tree, but at least to something useful! Yes, we all know it is bad to cut down trees, we know we can read the newspaper online nowadays, but personally I still prefer reading a good old newspaper in paper format. Designer Meike Meijer and DesignLabel ViJ5 take newspapers back to their origins by turning them into a wood-like building material called NewspaperWood. Furniture, decorative objects and even jewelry look spectacular when made with the artificial wood. Here is a short interview with the team on their inspiration. 

Self-Healing Paint

Fixing scratches on cars and furniture may be cheap and easy to do yourself in the not-too-distant future. Together with partners in the USA and Switzerland, Case Western Reserve University have developed a polymer-based material that can heal itself when placed under ultraviolet light for less than a minute.

Nissan has applied this technology and produced iPhone cases as the world's first "self-healing" iPhone case. Stuart Rowan, Professor of Engineering at Case Western Reserve University will explain how it works in this video: 

Instructions

Let those who have never sinned throw the first stones: How many times have we got lost even with IKEA instructions? Building things is a process that needs a specific order. Ikea designers know they have to deal with non-technician-ordinary-people, and yet those explanations for dummies always lack something.