Why Bamboo Is ECO (and Awesome)
Bamboo is awesome. No, really. Like, ‘inspires awe’ awesome.
Really.
Asia figured this out a long time ago and has been using bamboo for centuries. It grows quickly, it’s strong but flexible, and can be used to make thousands of different objects, structures, and even foods. It grows faster than any plant in the world, and it pulls CO2 out of the atmosphere and sequesters it in biomass and soil. Because of this, it also has the potential to be used as a solution to climate change.
So I decided to do a little bit of digging into this amazing plant!
What is bamboo?
Contrary to what many think, bamboo is actually a type of grass, rather than a kind of tree. There are thousands of different species of bamboo, and they top the list of fastest-growing plants in the world, with 2nd place nowhere close. In the spring, bamboo grows at a speed that you can actually see: ~1 inch per hour. With optimal growing conditions, bamboo can grow 3 feet in 24 hours and to full height (from 15 to 30 feet) in 3-4 months. After reaching full size, it will continue to thicken and strengthen and reach full maturity in 4-8 years. After being cut, it doesn’t need to be replanted or re-seeded: it begins to sprout and grow again on its own.
Bamboo also has natural anti-bacterial properties that repel most kinds of bacteria and insects, meaning no pesticides or chemicals are needed for growing or harvesting, and it requires little to no tending.
How has bamboo been used traditionally?
Bamboo has been used for centuries throughout Asia for many good reasons: it has extraordinary physical properties. It’s light and durable, and yet has the compressive strength of concrete and the tensile strength of steel. It has been used as a primary building material for huts and houses, as well as in furniture and even plumbing. It has also historically been used to make bicycles, boats, baskets, fabric, and even turned into charcoal.
Harvested in its very early stages, it is edible and a common healthy, traditional food in China and Japan. It is also commonly used in animal feed.
Young bamboo shoots 
Chinese dish made with bamboo shoots 
Bamboo pulp for paper
With just a little more maturation, it can be harvested for pulp to be used in paper-making. Compared to the standard pine trees that are used to produce pulp for paper, bamboo can produce 6 times as much pulp.
Modern science has also used bamboo in the production of biofuel. It’s useful in so many different applications!
What makes bamboo good for the environment?
Bamboo has been called the “green steel” for the properties mentioned before, but bamboo used in construction is not new. These days, bamboo is growing in popularity as a replacement for high carbon-emission materials like cotton, plastics, steel, aluminum, and concrete. It’s light weight means it is easily transported and it has been found in modern applications of flooring, walls, roofing, concrete reinforcement, and scaffolding.
For those other materials, production can create huge amounts of greenhouse gases: concrete produced almost 8% of the CO2 emissions, plastic and metals also have pretty large carbon footprints. Bamboo, actually is carbon negative! So when we replace other materials with bamboo, it eliminates the carbon footprint that is emitted by producing those materials.
Because of the anti-bacterial properties that protect bamboo from bacteria and insects, bamboo fibers are safe and hygienic. As such, bamboo makes a natural choice for hygienic products like straws, cutlery, and toothbrushes. If properly treated with varnish, it can last for years and years.
Clearly, bamboo makes a fantastic eco-alternative in many applications. But it still gets better: the growth of bamboo itself slows climate change.
Bamboo is a natural carbon capture system
Bamboo sequesters carbon! Like other plants and trees, bamboo absorbs CO2 from the atmosphere and stores it as biomass that it uses to grow, but it also stores carbon in the soil under the bamboo. And because of how fast bamboo grows, it removes carbon out of the air faster than almost any other plant and quickly sequesters it. Some estimates suggest that bamboo can sequester 2.9 tons of carbon per acre per year, which is approximately double the carbon dioxide that can be absorbed by the same acreage of trees.
Not only that, but bamboo is also well-suited to grow on degraded lands that are no longer suitable for farming, like soil that has been ruined by decades of industrial farming. It also can grow on steep slopes where no other crops will grow. Because it uses minimal water and requires almost no care, it is also very easy and inexpensive to raise.
I’m convinced. Bamboo is awesome. Why aren’t we just growing bamboo everywhere?
Bamboo grows well under almost any conditions, but this strength is also dangerous if left unchecked: bamboo is considered by many to be an invasive species. If its growth is not controlled, it can spread very quickly, crowding out and strangling other plants. This quick spread can have a detrimental effect on the native ecosystems, and tends to form a bamboo monoculture with reduced biodiversity. But, with carefully managed growth on land that is well selected, its spread can be controlled.
If bamboo is going to be grown as a resource and carbon sequestration system, it needs to be planted primarily on land that isn’t wilderness, forest, or useful land that can be used for other purposes, like growing crops. Instead, it should be grown on land that is of no other use: land degraded by decades of industrial agriculture or land that has steep slopes that have little other use.
Bamboo as a solution to climate change
According to Drawdown, today bamboo is planted on approximately 77 million acres, with an estimated additional 37 million acres of degraded/abandoned land that could be used to grow bamboo.
Used in this way, over a 30-year period, bamboo could capture 7.22 gigatons of carbon. Need a mental image of how much carbon that is?
Well 1 gigaton of water would fill the equivalent of 400,000 olympic sized swimming pools. So by implementing bamboo as Drawdown suggests, we could store…
400,000 X 7.22 gigatons = 2,888,000 olympic-sized swimming pools of CO2! That’s a LOT of CO2!
Not only is this a great solution to capturing carbon out of the atmosphere, it would be a vendure that would save us money as well.
Drawdown estimated that an initial investment of 24 billion dollars could yield a 30-year financial return of 265 billion dollars. How is it that bamboo could save us that much money?
The savings come primarily from the fact that by reducing the amount of CO2 in the air, we reduce the level of climate change we have to face. Less global temperature change means less damage from natural disasters, wildfires, hurricanes, and other negative effects of climate change. By eliminating some of that damage, we save money that was potentially spent on building defenses against and repairing damage from climate change.
The cost itself was calculated as the amount needed to purchase, install and operate a bamboo growing operation over 30 years. It’s important to note also that this is probably a conservative estimate. Because technologies improve and get cheaper, the actual operation/maintenance cost will probably be less and the amount of savings more.
We need bamboo…And every other climate solution we can implement.
Solving climate change is not going to be solved by one silver bullet of a solution. We need to implement every single solution that we can think of, and of the solutions we have available to us, growing bamboo to sequester carbon is one of the best ones we have! It’s definitely in the top 50 (Drawdown ranked #35). But even at that, we still have a long way to go.
For comparison, in the year 2016, we emitted 14,400,000 olympic-sized swimming pools of CO2 globally. So by capturing about 3 million olympic-sized swimming pools over 30 years with bamboo only captures about 4 months of our global CO2 output…We have lots of work to do.
So if you want to learn more about other climate solutions, be sure to check out the book Drawdown, as well as their website, where they publish a report every year on the progress of climate solutions.
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