Rise | We've Done the Research
The Sustainability Benefits of Bamboo
Is Bamboo Is Easy to Grow?
Bamboo, as a crop, doesn't require any petrochemical fertilizers or pesticides. It also has low water/irrigation requirements. Once established on a plantation, bamboo can grow as much as three and a half feet per day. Bamboo is the fastest growing land plant globally and can grow as much as 1,000 times as fast as typical hardwood tree species.
Is Bamboo a Proven Building Material?
Bamboo has been used for hundreds of years as structural support for several story buildings. Bamboo grows to full height in just one growing season, when it can but harvested into pulp, or it can be left to grow to full maturity in four to eight years.
According to Drawdown, a book by Paul Hawken on potential carbon sequestration strategies, he states that bamboo's compressive strength is akin to that of concrete. Its tensile strength is similar to steel.
Bamboo has a carbon sequestration rate of 2.9 tons of carbon per acre annually. They also say that where bamboo can be substituted for aluminum, concrete, plastic, or steel, further emissions can be avoided.
Is Bamboo Energy Intensive?
It takes a lot of energy to make and ship it. Despite these sustainability advantages, bamboo products also have some serious downsides that need to be discussed and understood. First and foremost, the vast majority of bamboo grown for products used by the home and construction industries comes from Southeast Asia. In years past, a rural family might have cut down a small stand of bamboo growing in their back yard to use as the structural beams for their adobe home. Today, industrialized bamboo products come with an enormous embodied energy footprint.
Is Bamboo Manufacturing Environmentally Friendly?
Bamboo fabrics manufactured for clothing, curtains, and other textiles, the hard bamboo stalk must be chemically dissolved. This process creates a toxic liquid that contains sodium hydroxide and carbon disulfide. These chemicals allow companies to use the cellulose strands of bamboo to turn them into bamboo-based rayon or viscose fabrics. These harsh chemicals can potentially cause environmental damage to waterways while also leaching harmful gasses into the atmosphere.
Flooring
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If you can't find bamboo products sourced from North America, at the very least, search for bamboo that comes with a sustainability certification. While bamboo is an excellent crop to help farmers regenerate barren and abused lands, cutting down an old-growth forest for a quick-growing bamboo crop would be an ecological blunder. EcoPlanet Bamboo is a company that owns and develops integrated bamboo plantations and bamboo farms around the world and also has clean processing facilities for the products they make.
Another tip: search for bamboo products that are low-VOC or VOC-free and don't rely on formaldehyde as a finishing agent. Teragen Bamboo Products offers a wide variety of bamboo-based products for the home, including flooring, panels, veneers, stair treads, and risers as a more sustainable interior design alternative. This company makes all of its products with VOC emissions that are TSCA Title VI Compliant. They also comply with the California 01350 standard for indoor air quality. Both are excellent criteria for evaluating the effect of products on your health.
When it comes to bamboo-based fabrics for the home, make sure you look for material made from bamboo lyocell or Tencel. The manufacturing process for these bamboo fabrics recycles the water and chemicals required to break down bamboo into usable fibers. This way, they operate as a closed-loop cycle and avoid the potential damage that can occur when these chemicals are released into the natural environment.
Bamboo is a unique design aesthetic. If you like the look and feel, it's an overall positive choice for your home—especially if you follow the guidelines above for choosing a better type of bamboo product.
Tobias Roberts
Tobias runs an agroecology farm and a natural building collective in the mountains of El Salvador. He specializes in earthen construction methods and uses permaculture design methods to integrate structures into the sustainability of the landscape.
