Bamboo, the hallow-stemmed species of grass is no ordinary and flimsy grass. The material, especially bamboo plywood, is now getting real attention from top architects around the world. Not in just China and some East Asian countries, bamboo has become extremely popular around the world and for good reasons. You can find churches, bridges, holiday resorts and luxury villas made of bamboo these days.

There are advocates of bamboo made furniture items who often call bamboo, ‘vegetal steel’, to imply the hardness and eco-friendliness of the material. It is lighter than steel but, and this will shock you, at least five times stronger than concrete. Unfortunately, large scale production of this plant isn’t really a feasible idea in Europe or North America since the plant is native to all continents except these two.

Timber grows slow, but bamboo is relatively a fast-growing plant. A woody stalk of a bamboo plant can grow several inches in a day and absorbs four times more carbon dioxide compared to the hardwood trees such as oak and maple. This aside, bamboo plywood has more resistance to moisture and water than steel. It’s just as cheap as steel. If you don’t believe what bamboo can do, just visit the Mexico City once in your life to see the 55,200 square feet large Nomadic Museum, which is made of bamboo materials only (or simply Google the museum name).

Bamboo is now a high-tech material for world’s best builders, and not just some exotic building material that is an exception to convention. Bamboo is very much mainstream now. Seismic testing of bamboo by Jules Janseen in Costa Rica back in 1991 had proved that bamboo materials have even better resistance to earthquake than concrete and brick. She found almost all the concrete and brick structures around her completely collapsed after a deadly earthquake hit Costa Rica at that time, but 20-odd bamboo structures that were built there stood still. 

In this age and time, when earthquakes have become everyday reality in some regions and the burgeoning world population reaching significant threats to the environment, the social and environmental benefits of bamboo plywood cannot be ignored. While steel is produced in only a few countries and bamboo is a completely renewable natural resource, it goes without saying that some twelve species out of a total of fifty species of bamboo are going to shift the paradigms of the furniture making industry forever.

However, making bamboo plywood and other types of building materials is a highly labour-intensive procedure and can be costly too. However, if a manufacturer has easy access to a vast reserve of raw materials, the manufacturing costs can be kept considerably low. While the stereotype is bamboo-built homes are rickety and the material is ideal for makeshift housing, the reality is just the opposite. Bamboo is not just poor man’s lumber, contrary to what many people think and what the dealers of hardwood try to propagate time and again. In the US, prefab homes with bamboo plywood and bamboo flooring component parts sourced from China have become quite trendy and popular.

While a genuine concern of primarily west-based environmentalists is that the bamboo crops are now really adequate for meeting the global demands, scarcity of bamboo was never a problem for China based manufacturers, and perhaps this is the reason why China is often dubbed as the ‘bamboo capital of the world’. Sustainable farming of bamboos is the mantra of China based manufacturers and that has made the material more viable and feasible than ever before.

Bamboo plywood is poised for further growth in the US and European markets, and China domestic market also shows string signs of growth. The countries around the tropics are also leaning towards sustainable housing, with China long been at the vanguard of the movement. With increasing demand for it all over the globe, it seems that bamboo decking, bamboo flooring and other bamboo materials for home building will soon surpass the conventional materials such as steel and concrete in terms of popularity.