Dear EarthTalk: Why are some people in the green building industry so optimistic about bamboo?
—Tim Carey, Puyallup, WA
Bamboo, one of the fastest growing plants in the world, has been known as a rudimentary building material for many centuries. Although the resource is now often limited to scaffolding or remote residential projects, advocates have recently rallied for its use in modern construction. To counteract the growing greenhouse gas emissions in this industry, bamboo can become an alternative to traditional building materials and mitigate climate change with both economic benefits and sustainable properties.
Contrary to popular belief, bamboo is a type of grass and not a tree, so it has a unique advantage as a timber. While trees typically die after timber harvest and take decades to regrow, bamboo stems can be continuously harvested and regenerated without killing the plant, making it a virtually unlimited renewable resource. In addition, bamboo can compete with the robust properties of more resource-intensive materials. It withstands greater compressive forces than concrete and has a tensile strength similar to steel.
What makes bamboo so unique is its ability to directly combat climate change. Like most plants, it absorbs carbon dioxide (CO2), the most important greenhouse gas, throughout its life, removing it from the atmosphere and storing it. Researchers from China's Xihua University find that each cubic meter of structural components made of bamboo stores up to 187 kilograms of CO2 over the entire life cycle. When harvested and used as a material, bamboo can act as a permanent emissions store.
“It’s a great way to remove carbon from the environment and ensure it’s not released again,” said Atelier One engineer Chris Matthews Dezeen in 2023. “In general, the idea of bio-based materials, where we capture carbon and lock it in a building, has to be the way forward.” Normally, the industrial finishing of wood such as tropical hardwood emits so much CO2 that the The benefits of this carbon biocapture are offset, making the process climate neutral. However, bamboo is different. Dutch researchers found that the overall carbon footprint of flattened bamboo (similar use to tropical hardwood) is negative.
Bamboo isn't perfect; Matthews admits that it is “susceptible to fungal and insect attack.” Therefore, researchers continue to develop more effective products such as laminated bamboo, densely glued blocks of bamboo fibers and hybrid materials. Project Drawdown, which provides free ideas and guides for climate solutions to ease the transition to a carbon-neutral world, sponsors projects to implement bamboo in degraded forest lands to help mitigate climate change. Bamboo can become the future of sustainable construction. Bamboo's renewability and carbon sequestration ability make it an increasingly valuable building material.
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