The Future Lies in Wood Pulp There are so many good things to
say about nano-crystalline cellulose, it's hard to know where to
begin. It's lightweight, it conducts electricity, it's strong as
Kevlar, it's not harmful to humans, and it's made cheaply from a
resource we've got in spades. And as of July, it's being
produced at a Wisconsin factory run by the U.S. Forest Service's
Forest Products Laboratory, the third of its kind and the first
in the United States. Executives from IBM, Ecolab, and Lockheed
Martin attended the opening of the $1.7 million facility in
Madison, which is expected to support the burgeoning
nanocellulose market and contribute to what the USDA thinks will
be a $600 billion industry by 2020. In this video from the local
NBC news station, experts predict a "domino effect across all
industries," and called the plant a "game-changer." So what is
it exactly? NCC is composed of tiny fibers of cellulose, the
most common organic compound on Earth, which is found in
abundance in all plant material