Bamboo has seen an enormous increase in demand over the past few years and its eco-friendly/organic image has fuelled its popularity. On the whole, we would say it is a great alternative to cutting down trees whenever possible and an extremely versatile material, however, a few issues must be recognised as stated below.
Advantages
- Fast-growing
- naturally pest-resistant
- sustainable harvesting methods
- low water consumption
- positive impact on greenhouse gases.
Bamboo fabric, is it eco-friendly?
It depends, first we need to consider the type of bamboo fabric it is.
- Bamboo linen – 100% bamboo mechanical process, hard to find, expensive and coarse feeling.
- Bamboo viscous – typically mixed with rayon, uses harsh chemicals (caustic soda and hydrochloric acid) to break down the fibre creating toxic wastewater which in-turn can devastate areas surrounding the factory.
- Bamboo lyocell – also a viscous blend but made using closed-loop production, meaning the water is recycled over and over again.
Out of all the 3 main types of bamboo we understand that consumers prefer the softness of viscous bamboo, so we recommend using lyocell – bamboo.
There are some additional sticking points about using bamboo that need to be readdressed:
- Mainly used for viscous processing – produces excessive water pollution
- Loss of natural characteristics during processing, e.g anti-bacterial.
- Concern about the loss of panda habitat
- Limited capacity to block UV rays
- consumer confusion about how natural it is.
Is bamboo wood eco-friendly?
Bamboo is growing enormously in popularity for its natural, sustainable, eco-friendly image.
The most important thing to consider when purchasing bamboo wood items is that bamboo rots quickly and needs to be treated in order to make it suitable for production into different items. There are numerous methods and chemicals used to treat the wood which can have harmful or minimal effects on the natural environment. At better switch green our suppliers use wood traditionally treated with smoke, water leaching or environmentally safe chemicals.