Some furniture companies are touting their products as being "green" due to their use of trees from FSC certified or responsibly harvested forests. While this is indeed a good effort on their part and a facet of being "eco-friendly", it does not detract form the fact that it can take from 30-50 years, dependent on the species, for a replacement tree to generate to full mass for lumber harvesting. Also, often gas powered machines are used for cutting these trees down. While waiting for regrowth, there is less oxygen produced, less carbon dioxide consumed and more soil run-off in the area from which the tree was harvested - all of these factors contributing to a negative environmental effect.
In our efforts to produce a product that is "green" or "eo-friendly", we have decided to get to the "root: of the problem, so to speak. Instead of looking at typical lumber used in furniture manufaturing, we are replacing traditional wood with bamboo in some of our collections.
Bamboo is a regenerative grass that is able to be harvested continually over its lifespan. A bamboo forest can yield up to 25 times the biomass of an equivalently sized forest of trees. In the regions of Asia in which the grass grows, the harvests are typically taken from bambooplantations and are cut down by hand using traditional implements, thus reducing pollution. Due to its intricate root system, once harvested, the plant will sprout a new shoot, which can be the re-harvested in 3-5 years!
Bamboo Facts:
Incredible tensile strength
Fastest growing plant (grass) on Earth
Regenerative properties (3-5 years) due to intricate root sytem
Grows in large amounts (25x the biomass of a tree forest)
Superor water resistance
Unlike wood, it does not need to be impregnated with oils
Lightweight
Natural, aesthetic beauty
Believed to help reverse the effects of global warming
