BAMBOO

Considerations:

Bamboo is actually a group of perennial grasses, with several varieties that produce hard, strong, dimensionally stable wood which has been used as a building material for millennia. Vertically laminated flooring and plywood products consist of layers of bamboo compressed with a binder, creating a durable, resilient finish material.

Advantages and challenges with bamboo flooring:

• Very rapidly renewable: harvesting a “tree” that matures in as little as one year helps to conserve forest resources.
• Bamboo flooring is strong, hard, and dimensionally stable.
• Durable and resilient: Floors can last decades when well maintained. As with all flooring, minimizing grit is the best defense against wear. It can be sanded and refinished when necessary. The deeper wear pattern of vertical grain bamboo will allow more cycles of refinishing, providing greater longevity.
• The installed cost can be high, but good quality bamboo is often less expensive than comparable hardwoods.
• Bamboo is primarily harvested and processed overseas; its embodied energy is lower than many materials, but shipping does consume non-renewable petroleum resources.
• Like most interior-grade hardwood plywoods, bamboo flooring is usually made with a urea formaldehyde binder, which can emit tiny amounts of formaldehyde. Choosing high quality products, particularly from manufacturers that provide independent air-quality testing data, can help to minimize this source of indoor air pollution.
• To minimize VOC emissions, factory applied sealants and finishes are preferable.

Summary: Bamboo

In Asia, bamboo has been used both decoratively and structurally for thousands of years, but bamboo flooring is relatively new in the U.S. The swift growth, strength, and durability of bamboo make it an environmentally superior alternative to hardwood flooring. While some hardwood trees require a century to reach maturity, some bamboo varieties can be harvested in as little as one year. Most commonly, bamboo is harvested on a four or five year cycle, and the mature forest will continue to send up new shoots for decades. Pine forests have the most rapid growth among tree species, but bamboo "grass" species used in flooring can grow more than three feet per day and produce almost twice as much harvestable fiber per year. Though bamboo grows rapidly, it can nonetheless yield a product that is 13% harder than rock maple (EDC, 2001), with durability comparable to red oak.

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