Bamboo! Sustainable House Construction.

Using Bamboo as a sustainable resource is something I haven’t covered up to now. Pretty well everyone knows about bamboo, but how many people really know about what a miraculous material it is. It’s as if bamboo was designed specifically as a sustainable resource, and it’s amazing that it has been practically ignored for use on a large scale, for any number of things.

My topic for this post, is Bamboo for sustainable house construction, though as you can see from the article below, Bamboo is probably one of the most versatile materials naturally produced on our planet. It can literally be used for a million and one things. It really is a 200 million year old miracle. It’s certainly a baffling miracle that it’s not woven into the fabric of our everyday lives.

I could sit here typing away for ever, ok, a very long time, extolling the virtues of bamboo, but my aim is to be informative, without belabouring the point. So I’ll leave my introduction here, and let you get on and have a read of the article and watch the video’s below.

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Bamboo Facts
Bamboo has been around for over 200 million years, and is the fastest growing plant on earth. It is used to make thousands of useful things, including housing, furniture, musical instruments, art utensils, paper, and food. Bamboo is a real symbol of flexibility.

• Strong as steel, nuclear tough, and striking beauty in both its natural and finished state, these qualities have given bamboo a longer and more varied role in human cultural evolution than any other plant on earth.
• The needle in Alexander Graham Bell’s first phonograph was made of bamboo.
• In 1882, Thomas Edison used bamboo as filaments in the world’s first light bulb manufacturing.
• Some bamboo can grow 18 inches per day and reaches a height of 100 feet. A bamboo stand generates more oxygen than an equivalent stand of trees.
• A suspension bridge on the river in China is 250 yard long, 9 foot wide and rests entirely on bamboo cables fastened over the water. It doesn’t have a single nail or piece of iron in it.
• A typical bamboo has a tensile strength of 28,000 per square inch vs. 23,000 for steel. That makes it one of the strongest materials in the world when it comes to tension structure.
• Used in ladders, scaffolding or fencing, bamboo is twice as stable as oak, and harder than walnut and teak.
Source: “The Book of Bamboo” by David Farrelly.

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Ok, not a lot of action, but I like the music