European Spruce (Picea Abies) has evergreen leaves and likes to grow in deep, wet soils.
Once harvested it can be turned into wood chips, and then into cellulose fiber by ways of extracting a brownish substance called lignin.
Cellulose and lignin are the two most abundant organic polymers on earth. While one is used excessively in a host of different industries such as the paper and textile industry, the other stays largely unexplored, remaining an underutilized by-product. In fact, to date lignin is mostly burned in thermal waste plants for the production of energy, with all the consequential negative emissions.
This project traces the journey that those two polymers take, back to the moment when the cellulose fiber was held together by the lignin in a tree.