Cellutech, a design start-up in Sweden, have come up with a wood-based alternative to Styrofoam. Their material, which they call Cellufoam, is made of wood pulp and is renewable and biodegradable. It is lightweight, suitable for packaging and many other purposes, including this bicycle helmet.
There are already wooden bicycle helmets on the market, but the Cellufoam helmet is the only one made entirely out of plant-based products. Lars Wågberg, one of the founding members of Cellufoam, explains that the outer layer is made of a wooden veneer, the strap from a strong paper product and the foam on the inside is Cellufoam.
The team behind the Cellufoam material are Lars Wågberg, a professor in fibre technology at the KTH Royal Institute of Technology, Lennart Bergström, a professor in material chemistry at Stockholm University, and Nicholas Tchang Cervin. They developed Cellufoam at the Wallenberg Wood Science Centre after being tasked to create something made entirely from materials from the Swedish forests.
They believe that, after further testing, Cellufoam could be used for water filtration, flame-retardent materials, and antibacterial materials.
