Bamboo Materials
As you may have noticed, bamboo is one of the biggest darlings in the natural product landscape. You can find it all over the place – kitchen utensils, keyboards, cutting boards, clothing – you name it. Perhaps one of the widest worlds of applications is its use in building materials. In that product category, you’ll find it used in flooring, countertops, cabinets, wall coverings, and much more. But is it all it’s cracked up to be?If you’re interested in building or remodeling with bamboo-based products, check out the true pros and cons for both your home and the planet.
Bamboo has an unparalleled growth rate in the plant world. Some types bamboo can put on 35 inches a day! Because the regeneration rate for bamboo forests is much quicker than any other woody plant, it’s a far superior sustainable choice.
Technically, bamboo is a grass and not a wood and its unique tissue lends itself to be an incredible building material. It’s different from other grass plants like sugar cane and corn, as it becomes harder over the years with a wood-like toughness. On the Janka Hardness Scale, natural bamboo rates in at 1380, harder than oak and ash. Unlike wood, however, its short fibers make it flexible and light, and this bendability makes bamboo a great choice for earthquake-prone areas. Additionally, Guadua bamboo is even said to exceed timber fibers and mild steel in strength! What wood could beat this combo of characteristics?
Eco Friendly And Green Building Materials For Construction
Bamboo functions essentially the same as wood, with no special installation techniques required. The harvesting and installation of bamboo is fairly simple. It’s easy to cut, no bark to peel during processing, and its lightness makes it ideal to handle, transport, and store. There are also numerous looks and options, allowing you to truly customize the bamboo to your home. For example, you can opt for bamboo flooring in various stains or types that appear to be a standard hardwood floor.
Aside from bamboo’s rapid growth rate, the production of bamboo also yields benefits to the planet. A complex root network anchors the soil down, preventing erosion when rain or flooding occurs. It also helps the soil retain water, aiding in moisture regulation throughout the rainy and dry seasons. Bamboo also absorbs more tons of CO2 than trees, due to its extreme growth rate. The booming market for bamboo could be a boon to our environment!
Choosing to build with bamboo could save you a few bucks, too. Do a basic Home Depot price comparison and you’ll see that many bamboo flooring options are only around $2 to $4 per square foot, versus about $4 to $6 for wood. Of course, when building green, doing a background check is important so that you actually buy bamboo that has been certified for sustainable practices. Fortunately, the Forest Stewardship Council has a directory that shows all of the FSC-certified bamboo companies.
K Bamboo Material In Materials
Due to bamboo’s high starch content, if the levels of sap or humidity are high, this plant is rather vulnerable to natural elements. Insects, fungus, rot, and fire may easily take advantage of harvested bamboo if it’s not cut, treated, and stored correctly. There are ways to treat it naturally, like air drying or using heat, but some manufacturers use harmful chemicals, like formaldehyde and arsenic. Although chemical emissions are relatively low, it’s still something to consider.
Sure, the plant itself is very renewable, but is it considered sustainable if it has to be shipped all the way around the world? Since the growing conditions in the U.S. are not as favorable for bamboo plantations as South America and Asia, we have to import it. Some may argue that this tarnishes bamboo’s eco cred, as fossil fuels are burned just to get it here. However, Building with Bamboo explains that harvesting and processing bamboo takes only a small amount of energy and the lightweight factor makes it excellent for boat transportation.
Considering how little regulation there is of bamboo as a building material, it can be tricky to tell what you’ll get out of the product. There are numerous components that determine the quality of bamboo, and it’s not always easy to differentiate from company to company. It all depends on the species of bamboo, where it was grown, the age at which it was harvested, plus the treatment and finish. Additionally, there’s insufficient data on how well bamboo floors can be refinished, putting the longevity of your floor at risk.
Organic Building Materials And Their Benefits — Biofilico Wellness Interiors
The moral of the bamboo story is that it certainly can be a smart choice for those wanting to build with the earth in mind, but doing your research before buying is incredibly important! Not all companies and products are created equal and it might take a bit of sleuthing to figure it out what’s what. Educating yourself on where your bamboo is coming from, if it has legitimate sustainability certifications, and what type of warranty your product has should help narrow your search.
The cookie settings on this website are set to allow cookies to give you the best browsing experience possible. If you continue to use this website without changing your cookie settings or you click Accept below then you are consenting to this.The Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations estimates that between 2015 and 2020, the planet lost 10 million hectares of forest a year to deforestation. While this paints a dire picture for biodiversity, Indigenous sovereignty, and a rapidly changing climate, there is hope on the horizon. A growing industry of sustainable building materials promises to curb deforestation and sequester a significant amount of carbon in the process.
Chief among them is bamboo. While traditional hardwood lumber can require 70 years to reach maturity, species of bamboo can be harvested in five to seven years. By far the fastest-growing woody plant on Earth, bamboo is actually a grass with a wide variety of applications from musical instruments to toilet paper and even wind turbines.
Is Bamboo The Building Material Of The Future?
Beyond its ability to regenerate quickly, bamboo offers a multitude of benefits. It thrives in poor soil conditions, prevents erosion, and requires minimal inputs such as fertilizer and pesticide, cutting down on water pollution. Even better, bamboo’s tensile strength per weight unit is greater than steel.
According to David Sands, co-founder of bamboo timber company Rizome, if bamboo made up even a modest market share of building materials, the climate impact could be monumental.
“Right now the projection is that the square footage of buildings on the planet is going to double in the next 40 years, and if that’s business as usual, that’s really going to sink our boat in terms of climate impact, ” he says. “If we can replace wood, concrete, and steel [with bamboo], at 12 per cent of global construction that would address one-third of humanity’s entire output of CO
Benefits Of Bamboo Clothing (plus The Disadvantages)
This figure includes bamboo’s actual carbon drawdown as well as the emissions avoided from steel and concrete production and cutting down trees for lumber. To convert this ambitious projection into a reality, Rizome is working to establish a large-scale global supply chain and provide engineered bamboo timber for a burgeoning market.
Sands’ epiphany came when he was building an off-grid home on Maui in the 1990s. Despite his attempts to use recycled materials, he realized that “there’s a whole forest that goes into every house in the U.S.”
Now Rizome is partnering with indigenous groups in Mindanao, the southernmost island in the Philippines. Decades of deforestation altered microclimates across Mindanao, making it more susceptible to wildfires and preventing reforestation efforts. “The only thing that was surviving the fires was the bamboo, ” Sands says. “Now we’re under contract to plant tens of thousands of acres over the next few years.”
Bamboo Vs. Other Building Materials
With a large planting operation underway and a new processing facility recently completed, Rizome is poised to feed a growing market across Asia. But this highlights one of the most common critiques of bamboo: about 80 per cent of the world’s bamboo forest area is in Southeast Asia. The necessity of transcontinental ocean freight contributes to greater emissions, reducing bamboo’s efficiency as a carbon sink (though it still has lower lifetime emissions than traditional timber).
To address this issue, Rizome is starting operations in Florida, with impressive results. “We did some test plots that exceeded anybody’s expectations, ” Sands says. “At 14 or 15 months, we had 30-foot-tall plants with 50 culms.” Each of these culms could produce a 220-pound pole, which can be harvested and processed into lumber.
As global demand increases, bamboo might move from a fringe building material to a commonplace component in homes and businesses around the world. While it seems far-fetched, some architects even hope to build skyscrapers using bamboo as a key material. Perhaps, if the bamboo industry grows as persistently as its primary product, an idealistic world with healthy forests, a stable climate, and regenerative building materials is more than a utopian fantasy.Bamboo is a renewable eco-crop with multiple uses in textiles, homeware and hardwares. But is bamboo sustainable and is it good for the environment?
Bamboo As A Construction Material
What else should I buy that’s made from bamboo?
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