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TorZo Sustainable Surfaces

By Rain Noe - March 17, 2010

in Materials

Pop quiz for materials experts: The machineable stuff in the following photo comes in sheets, like wood, but it ain't wood. What is it?

That's sugarcane, pressed together with an inert, non-hazardous acrylic polymer and rendered into Tiikeri, a material from Oregon-based TorZo Sustainable Surfaces.

There's no formaldehyde used in the lamination and sugarcane is fast-growing, making this a rapidly renewable material. It can also be worked with standard machining tools and it's highly durable, meaning it can be used in place of wood or plywood, saving on trees. As for the aesthetics, you either like it or you don't, but it's good to know it's out there as an option.

Another thing TorZo makes is Oriented Strand Board:

The great thing about OSB is that it's made out of chips and fibers, i.e. waste parts left over from milling wood, so you can essentially get a bunch of extra 4x8 sheets of material out of trees that have already been sacrificed; the bad thing about standard OSB is that the resins used to bind it will off-gas formaldehyde. But TorZo's variant, called Orient, uses their proprietary resin polymer and so remains formaldehyde-free.

From a distance, it kind of looks like marble:

You can learn more about TorZo's other sustainable materials here.

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Chris

13 years ago

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Well it certainly looks good in the photos. Be interesting to see it close up for real though.
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ScienceWorksPleaseUseIt

14 years ago

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Putting "inert, non-hazardous" in front of PMMA doesn't make it sustainable. It takes a lot of oil to produce and it burns pretty well, too. That said, a countertop that's 50% PMMA and 50% biomass is certainly more sustainable than one that's 100% PMMA, like Jon Stewart's desk.
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Scot

14 years ago

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Kind of looks like pressed meat. I think I like Kirei board more:

http://www.kireiusa.com/
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