Wooden'cha Know! 13 Things You Never Knew Were Made from Trees
Thursday, August 6, 2020 15:14:51 PM America/Los_Angeles
In a single morning, you use many more tree products than you might think.
You put a paper coffee filter into your coffee maker, dump two heaping tablespoons of grounds inside, and make french toast in a pan with a wooden handle wrapped in rubber while it brews. When it’s done, you put all of the fixings in your coffee and pour a good dollop of maple syrup on your perfectly stacked french toast. Can you count the number of tree-based products you used? Four! Pretty amazing, huh?
Tons of things we use everyday like paper, cardboard, and Bark Potty are made from trees, but that’s just the top of the canopy. Here’s a list of surprising everyday items that you might not know (or forgot) were made from trees.
Rubber & Rubber Products
Made from the sap of the rubber tree and refined in factories, rubber is a useful commodity that has a resounding presence in our everyday life. It can be found practically everywhere from the tires on our cars to the handles of our pans.
Maple Syrup
Pancakes and french toast wouldn’t taste half as good without this sticky sweet condiment. Maple syrup is made from the xylem sap of sweet, black, and red maple trees.
Cork Products
Cork boards, wine corks, and coasters- oh my! Cork is a water, termite, fire, and rot resistant wood product that comes from the phellem layer of bark tissue, harvested from the cork oak tree.
Medicine
If you appreciate natural medicinal remedies, you may already know that people have been using the bark of the willow tree to relieve pain for thousands of years. Willow also contains salicylic acid which is widely used in treatments for acne.
Sponges
You clean your dishes and cars with them, and they
Photo by Casey Horner
can be made of soap-treated tree-based cellulose! The wood pulp inside these porous sponges helps them absorb water.
Fabric
There are many sustainable apparel brands out there, and many of them make clothing from plant fibers like cotton and wood fibers. Athletic socks made of bamboo, for instance, are a great option because bamboo fibers are more breathable and water resistant than cotton or wool!
Makeup
Sustainable makeup brands are on the rise as consumers become more and more interested in cruelty free, non-synthetic beauty options. They use tree products like cocoa and shea butter, castor seeds, berry pigments, tea extracts, and more to create consumer and planet-thoughtful products!
Wax
Specifically, Carnauba wax is harvested from the fronds of said trees. You can find this wax in car polish, dental floss, and paper coatings.
Adhesives
Lignin is waste generated from making paper and ethanol from trees that can be chemically altered to make an adhesive that could replace the sticky substance we currently use in tape which is made from fossil fuels.
Chewing Gum
Chewing gum has actually been around since the Stone Age (no, this isn’t sarcasm), and was originally made from the sap of the sapodilla tree.
Henna Products
Henna dye (used in hair dyes and ink) is actually made by harvesting, drying, and grinding the leaves of the henna tree into a fine powder.
Latex
Much like rubber, latex is made by refining sap from the rubber tree. Latex can be found in latex gloves, rubber bands, balloons, chewing gum, tennis shoes, and more.
Honey
You know that bees make honey from flower pollen, but did you know that bees also pollinate trees, too? It’s certainly not their first choice, but bees will gather up honeydew (made when insects called aphids expel tree sap from their digestive system. We know, but it’s perfectly safe- we promise!) and turn it into honey. This type of honey is known as honeydew or forest honey, and it tends to be more malty and earthy than the kinds made from blossoms.
At Bark Potty, we pride ourselves on providing a sustainable indoor dog bathroom that can be reused and recycled, but we also take our corporate responsibility to the environment extremely seriously. In fact, we contribute 1% of every sale to One Tree Planted through One Percent for the Planet. In this way, we’re doing our part to beat back deforestation and ensure that our planet can sustain all of the amazing tree products we consume everyday- one tree at a time.