Bamboo Buildings | Green Energy News

September 5, 2004 – Vol.9 No.24

BAMBOO BUILDINGS.

Wood from properly managed forests is a sustainable building material. From timber to two-by-four to truss the wood products industry seems to be efficient in utilizing much of a wood harvest. The best wood becomes boards. The worst and the waste becomes manufactured wood products, particle board and such.

The processing of wood , too, is a low energy operation. In term of energy needed to process raw materials into finished goods (trees to dimension lumber) wood requires about one seventh the energy per pound as steel.

Wood too, which finds it way into the wall of a house or to the top of a dining room table is also storing carbon – keeping it from the atmosphere – for as long as the building stands or the table remains a table.

The downside of wood is that far too many forests aren’t managed well. They are wasteful operations, inefficient, not sustainable and damaging to the local and global environment. While a log that makes it to the mill to become wood products will store carbon for years – possibly hundreds of years – the waste that remains behind at logging sites begins to rot and release carbon. The harvesting of trees for paper products is another grim story.

So if wood is too often badly managed, what other naturally grown product could be used in its place?

What about bamboo?

In much of the world it’s common to see concrete and steel skyscrapers wrapped in bamboo scaffolding while under construction . Bamboo furniture is, of course, readily available. Laminated bamboo flooring and a plywood-like material – plyboo (tm) – is also readily available.

(It doesn’t seem right to call bamboo laminated into sheets plywood since bamboo is a grass not a wood.)

So if bamboo shows its strength as a building material, what about entire what building structures of bamboo?

Bambutec is promoting a system that utilizes bamboo that is joined together with machined laminated wood or bamboo blocks. The system is not unlike Tinker Toy (tm) construction toys that have been around for almost a century. Wood rods can be also used in place of bamboo. Most of the work to build a bamboo structure can be done on site.

The company is looking for partners to help commercialize the technology and is selling the machinery that cuts the ends of bamboo sections to fit into computer designed blocks. A gluing machine is also available as are wood and bamboo rods and other supplies.

The company also has the engineering completed for two structures that it has helped build, a building truss and a carport.

Bambutec claims it isn’t seeking high profits from the system and is more interested in seeing the technology grow. Partners would help in the commercialization of the system as well as contribute engineered designs to it.

Bottom line. If wood buildings can and do store carbon and keep it from the atmosphere and warming the planet, so should bamboo. Further, harvesting and processing bamboo appears to be a low energy process - probably lower than wood. And, unlike trees, bamboo does not have to be replanted and takes only a few years to grow to maturity, not decades.

Visit Bambutec at http://www.bambutec.org/

(An informative paper on bamboo is available at WFI Bamboo (flooring and bamboo ply manufacturer) at http://www.wfibamboo.com/ . Another flooring and plyboo (tm) marketer is Smith and Fong at http://www.plyboo.com/