LAUSR

Materials are the cornerstone of human society. Environmentally friendly and sustainable bio-based materials are the key to achieving sustainable development, which is urgently needed to meet global challenges [1–4]. Different from petroleum-based materials, bio-based plant materials are derived from carbon dioxide in the atmosphere, which is fixed by the photosynthesis of plants to form biomaterials like wood. The use of these materials by humans can be traced back to ancient times. However, the existing materials processed from bio-based raw materials are still very limited, mainly including particle board, shaving board, wood-plastic or wood-inorganic materials, etc. [5]. These materials are severely restricted by their dependence on petroleum-based adhesive, complex manufacturing processes and insufficient mechanical performance.How to achieve efficient utilization of bio-basedmaterials and process them into high-performance materials is still a huge challenge. A team led by Shu-Hong Yu at the University of Science and Technology of China has reported a high-performance sustainable regenerated isotropic wood (RGI-wood), composed of surface nanocrystallizedwoodparticles (SNWP) by an efficient bottom-up strategy with micro/nanoscale structure design [6]. In this work, wood particles with lots of cellulose nanofibers expanded from their surfaces are firstly prepared through a novel surface nanocrystallization method (Fig. 1a–c). This method allows only the cellulose on the surface of microscale wood particles to be transformed into cellulose nanofibers. This micro/nanoscale structure design results in the SNWPs, which can be processed as microparticles but bound to each other like cellulose nanofibers through strong hydrogen bonds and additional electrostatic bonds (Fig. 1d) followed by hot pressing. The strong bonds between SNWPsmake RGI-wood