Bamboo as an Environmentally Friendly Resource
Environmentally Friendly Building
Bamboo house with Solar panels
“With so many seeking environmentally friendly lifestyles, bamboo’s reputation is growing” (Howell, 2009, p. 227). Used as a construction material bamboo has been used to build environmentally friendly buildings (Mahdavi et al., 2011). Mahdavi, Clouston, and Arwade (2011) have found that bamboo “is highly renewable and has low embodied energy,” making construction practices shift toward sustainable bamboo building (p. 1036). Bamboo’s impact on the environment has shown to be twenty times less than other alternatives used in today’s society (Mahdavi et al., 2011). This means that bamboo has a “factor 20” environmental impact which is expressed as an environmental cost in units depending on societal costs due to environmental damage (Mahdavi et al., 2011, p. 1036). To figure out how sustainable bamboo production really is, all factors must be considered, for example: labor, fuel, materials, and natural resources (Mahdavi et al., 2011). Mahdavi et al.’s (2011) “data show that the sustainability of bamboo is far better than all of the alternatives considered,” like steel and concrete materials (p. 1041). The economic costs of using bamboo however are higher than that of other wood substances and steel but as the idea of bamboo construction becomes more knowledgeable and widespread the costs of producing bamboo products are expected to considerably decrease (Mahdavi et al., 2011). Overall, bamboo is starting to become and increasingly popular environmentally friendly building resource (Mahdavi et al., 2011). Along with using bamboo as a construction tool, its popularity in the textile industry has grown (Howell, 2009; Waite, 2009).
Environmentally Friendly Textiles
Clothing made with bamboo fibers
Similar to its role in building, bamboo is known for its advantages as a sustainable textile-manufacturing product (Waite, 2009). Bamboo as a raw material is so popular because of “its fast renewability, its biodegradabiltiy, its efficient space consumption, it low water use, and its organic status” (Waite, 2009, p.1). These advantages are huge when using it as a raw material to create fabric because it produce 50 times the amount of cotton fiber per acre and provide a quicker harvest than most trees (Waite, 2009). Bamboo also has no use of pesticides because as stated before it has “a natural antifungal and antibacterial agent known as bamboo Kun,” which continues to protect as a fabric material (Waite, 2009, p. 15). Unfortunately the manufacturing processes of bamboo today are still not very eco friendly but Waite (2009) states, “improvement through closed-loop manufacturing strategies, more efficient equipment, and the use of more eco-friendly compounds to extract fibers” will improve the environmental status of bamboo textile production (p. 12).