{"id":34627,"date":"2026-09-09T17:20:48","date_gmt":"2026-09-09T21:20:48","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/therapytoronto.ca\/news\/?p=34627"},"modified":"2026-09-09T11:27:38","modified_gmt":"2026-09-09T15:27:38","slug":"white-is-more-than-a-color-how-nature-inspired-a-new-sustainable-way-to-make-white-water-repellent-materials","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/therapytoronto.ca\/news\/2026\/09\/white-is-more-than-a-color-how-nature-inspired-a-new-sustainable-way-to-make-white-water-repellent-materials\/","title":{"rendered":"White is more than a color: How nature inspired a new sustainable way to make white, water-repellent materials"},"content":{"rendered":"

Look closely at Hokusai’s The Great Wave off Kanagawa<\/em>, one of Japan’s most iconic masterpieces. The brilliant white of the waves, the snow on Mount Fuji and the clouds above contain no white pigment. Instead, their whiteness comes from the way light scatters off the unprinted fibers of the washi paper itself.<\/p>\n

This optical phenomenon\u2014known as structural whiteness<\/strong>\u2014is the same mechanism that makes sea spray, snow, and clouds appear bright white in nature. Throughout nature, from plant tissues to protective frog nests, foamed structures made mostly of air scatter light with extraordinary efficiency, creating intense whiteness without the need for pigments.<\/p>\n

This natural phenomenon inspired an international research team\u2014led by Professor Easan Sivaniah of Kyoto University\u2019s Institute for Integrated Cell-Material Sciences (iCeMS), alongside collaborators from Tokyo Metropolitan University and Donghua University\u2014to develop a new foam-based materials platform<\/strong> that solves two major industrial challenges in everyday materials.<\/p>\n

Today, white packaging, films and coatings rely heavily on titanium dioxide (TiO?) to provide brightness and opacity in creating white materials, but safety concerns recently led the European Union to ban its use as a food additive. Meanwhile, fluorinated materials known as PFAS are widely used to provide water and oil repellency, but growing concerns about their persistence and potential environmental and health impacts are driving efforts around the world to develop alternatives.<\/p>\n

To address these challenges, the team developed a technology that generates whiteness and controls water repellency through precisely engineered porous structures that reproduce the light-scattering behavior of natural foams, drawing inspiration from natural surfaces such as leaves and flower petals.<\/p>\n

\u201cA key challenge faced by biomimetic science is realizing environmentally friendly material designs inspired by nature at the scale and cost of existing materials.\u201d
\n\u2014 Assoc. Prof. Taiki Yanagishima, Tokyo Metropolitan University<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

The fabrication process is remarkably simple. It uses light followed by treatment with a mild solvent. Light first breaks the polymer into smaller molecular fragments. These fragments interact with the solvent, causing the material to swell and form an open, porous structure. Through this single process, the material achieves two distinct functions<\/strong>. Internally, the porous structure scatters light to create intense whiteness without added pigments. On the surface, the foam transforms into an extremely rough structure with strong water-repellent properties, similar to those found on a lotus leaf.<\/p>\n

The research team named this technology Deep Foam Photolithography (DFP).<\/p>\n

Working with textile researchers at Donghua University, one of China\u2019s leading institutions for textile science and engineering, the team demonstrated that the process can be applied not only to printable polymer films but also to fabrics. Importantly, the process does not require the development of entirely new specialty chemicals and has already been demonstrated with several commercially available polymers.<\/p>\n

The result is a new printable materials<\/strong> platform, capable of ultrahigh resolution (20,000 DPI), that combines structural whiteness with water-management functionality\u2014without titanium dioxide and without PFAS.<\/p>\n

The technology opens new opportunities by enabling lighter materials and reducing dependence on mined mineral pigments and persistent fluorinated chemicals. By generating color and surface functionality from the physical structure of the material itself, rather than relying on added pigments or persistent chemical coatings, the approach offers a fundamentally different, sustainable way to engineer everyday materials\u2014delivering function through structure rather than chemistry.<\/p>\n

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JOURNAL<\/h4>\n

Nature<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Look closely at Hokusai’s The Great Wave off Kanagawa, one of Japan’s most iconic masterpieces. The brilliant white of the waves, the snow on Mount Fuji and the clouds above contain no white pigment. Instead, their whiteness comes from the way light scatters off the unprinted fibers of the washi paper itself. This optical phenomenon\u2014known… <\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":3,"featured_media":34628,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"rop_custom_images_group":[],"rop_custom_messages_group":[],"rop_publish_now":"no","rop_publish_now_accounts":[],"rop_publish_now_history":[],"rop_publish_now_status":"pending","neve_meta_sidebar":"","neve_meta_container":"","neve_meta_enable_content_width":"off","neve_meta_content_width":70,"neve_meta_title_alignment":"","neve_meta_author_avatar":"","neve_post_elements_order":"","neve_meta_disable_header":"","neve_meta_disable_footer":"","neve_meta_disable_title":"","footnotes":""},"categories":[368,798,953,915,348],"tags":[997,464,998,1000,999],"class_list":["post-34627","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-communication","category-ecology","category-environment-2","category-nature","category-technology-2","tag-foam","tag-light","tag-materials","tag-pigments","tag-strucrural-whiteness"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/therapytoronto.ca\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/34627","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/therapytoronto.ca\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/therapytoronto.ca\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/therapytoronto.ca\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/3"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/therapytoronto.ca\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=34627"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/therapytoronto.ca\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/34627\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":34629,"href":"https:\/\/therapytoronto.ca\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/34627\/revisions\/34629"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/therapytoronto.ca\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/34628"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/therapytoronto.ca\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=34627"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/therapytoronto.ca\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=34627"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/therapytoronto.ca\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=34627"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}