UBC’s Centre for Interactive Research on Sustainability is one of several buildings on the Vancouver campus where Western red cedar is used as a building material. Researchers at the Okanagan campus are looking at ways to make the wood stronger by using a plastination preservation technique. Photo credit: Don Erhardt.
A technique used for the long-term preservation of human and animal remains is now being tested on one of Canada’s most iconic building materials—the Western red cedar.
Plastination, originally designed to embalm the dead, is now being used to improve the functionality and durability of advanced composite materials.
A team from UBC Okanagan’s School of Engineering has been experimenting with the technique and previously published a study that examined the plastination of bamboo to create a strong and durable composite building material.
The researchers have taken that work one step further, and in their latest study demonstrated the technique can also be used on Western red cedar to make it stronger and protect the wood from water damage and decay. The study was published in the journal Materials.
“Western red cedar is prized for its abundance and renewability, though its tendency to absorb moisture is a major drawback,” says doctoral student Olivia Margoto, a researcher with UBC’s Materials and Manufacturing Research Institute. “By applying plastination, we’re preserving the wood’s structure from the inside out—maintaining its strength while dramatically improving its resistance to water.”
Plastination is a new method for managing moisture in wood by replacing water in the cellular structure with a silicone compound to create a durable, hydrophobic barrier that resists swelling, rotting and cracking.
Unlike conventional wood protection treatments—which typically rely on surface coatings, bulk impregnation or chemical treatments—plastination offers a fundamentally different approach by first dehydrating the wood using acetone and infusing it with a compatible polymer.
This replaces water within the cells and preserves the anatomical architecture previously occupied by moisture, explains study supervisor Dr. Abbas Milani, Professor in the School of Engineering. Most importantly, the treatment does not compromise tensile strength and tends to improve the material’s flexibility.
“Plastination offers a powerful alternative to traditional wood preservatives, which often rely on toxic chemicals or short-lived coatings,” adds Dr. Milani. “This technique could extend the lifespan of natural wood products significantly, without sacrificing environmental performance.”
In their recent work, the researchers used advanced imaging and spectroscopy tools to confirm that the silicone deeply saturated the cedar’s microscopic channels, reducing water absorption by nearly 60 per cent and increasing surface hydrophobicity by more than 45 per cent.
They found that Western red cedar performed better than their earlier work on bamboo, likely because of the very different microstructure of these two natural materials. Western red cedar is a softwood composed of long, thin cells with microstructural dimensions up to seven times smaller than those of bamboo.
The research is supported by industrial partner NetZero Enterprises Inc., a Penticton-based company with a number of global sustainability projects underway. The company is collaborating on three projects with UBC researchers, and holds the Canadian and American patents on the plastination technique.
Other researchers on this project include Netzero Enterprises CEO Grant Bogyo and UBCO students Madisyn Szypula and Victor Yang.
This process shows significant moisture resistance in Western red cedar, which is encouraging for North American construction applications. Future work will explore ways to scale up the method, recover and reuse solvents, and substitute bio-based polymers for silicone to further reduce environmental impact.
“Nature has already given us incredible materials,” Margoto adds. “Our job is to make them last longer in a safe, sustainable and economical way.”
