Bamboo: a sustainable, renewable and environmentally friendly material

Ecological construction requirements such as environmental friendliness, resource conservation, and sustainable development are the basic thresholds that today's design needs to overcome. Ecological construction is the trend of future design development, and environmentally friendly materials are the basis for the development of ecological construction.

Bamboo is a traditional building material in Asia. It is also a sustainable and environmentally friendly material that comes from nature and has its own characteristics. There are about 100 to 1,000 species of bamboo in the world, mainly in Asia Pacific, America and Africa. China has one-third of the world's bamboo forest area.

Bamboo is a tree-like grass plant and is one of the fastest growing plants in the world. Moso bamboo can grow 15-18 meters in 30-40 days. In the same area, the yield of bamboo is 20 times that of trees.

Bamboo forests are one of the world's largest collectors of environmental carbon dioxide. Compared with other plants, bamboo releases 30% more oxygen into the atmosphere and absorbs more carbon dioxide. Bamboo has a strong structure, and its compression, tension and bending strength are greater than wood. The new modified bamboo material, while retaining the excellent properties of bamboo itself, needs to go through multiple processing steps such as high temperature heating, and desugaring to overcome the shortcomings of the original bamboo, such as large geometric variability, high sugar content, easy to be eaten by insects, uneven texture. It is widely favored by structural engineers.

Reconstructed bamboo is made by mechanically processing the original bamboo into regular bamboo strips, then carbonization and high temperature treated, and finally gluing them and hot-pressing into big bamboo boards. The big bamboo boards will be cut into pieces and made varieties of profiles. Such bamboo products are very durable, hard and strong, which are suitable for outdoor areas.

Bamboo is elegant and poetic, with its own unique style. From bamboo itself to modified materials, bamboo has already surpassed the performance of its raw materials. With the continuous exploration of technology, this renewable, natural and environmentally friendly material will play an outstanding part in the future.