Lignin is the most versatile material you've never heard of.

A SOCIETAL TRANSITION completely away from fossil fuels would be, to put it lightly, a massive endeavor. Take containers and packaging alone, the stuff that holds sodas, keeps eggs in their cartons, and holds late-night snacks in clamshell containers. The Environmental Protection Agency estimates that in 2017, the most recent year for which it has data, that plastic waste amounted to 14.5 million tons of municipal solid waste. Just how could all that packaging be reduced without dramatically upping the price of packaging? An interdisciplinary team at Belgian university KU Leuven has an idea that might sound counterintuitive at first: WOOD.

Wood, of course, comes from trees. And green energy is very much focused on conserving trees. Deforestation is a major problem around the globe—the Union of Concerned Scientists estimates that an area approximately the size of Switzerland is chopped down each year, and in 2016, the World Bank estimated that the world has lost 1.3 million square kilometers of forests since 1990, an area larger than South Africa.