The Future Lies in Wood Pulp

There are so many good things to say about nano-crystalline cellulose, it's hard to know where to begin. It's lightweight, it conducts electricity, it's strong as Kevlar, it's not harmful to humans, and it's made cheaply from a resource we've got in spades. And as of July, it's being produced at a Wisconsin factory run by the U.S. Forest Service's Forest Products Laboratory, the third of its kind and the first in the United States.

Executives from IBM, Ecolab, and Lockheed Martin attended the opening of the $1.7 million facility in Madison, which is expected to support the burgeoning nanocellulose market and contribute to what the USDA thinks will be a $600 billion industry by 2020. In this video from the local NBC news station, experts predict a "domino effect across all industries," and called the plant a "game-changer."