Not too long ago, I wrote a post about bamboo laptops which at the time I thought was an unusual product. Yet, since then I’ve seen quite a few examples of this example of old-world technology meeting with new. And it seems that the use of bamboo for laptop frames have a few more practical uses than I thought.
Here’s an article about bamboo laptops which talks a bit more about how bamboo laptops are making a fashion statement, but also seeing to certain safety issues too. According to the article, a lot of laptops, when discarded and replaced by this year’s model, are sent to the Third World where they are often stripped for parts.
The laptops are burned, and the metals left over are sold. But, burning a plastic laptop frame of course has a number of environmental and health concerns attached.
In addition to looking stylish then, many of these bamboo frame laptops are designed to be easy to disassemble, and use less materials which are likely to cause issues when the laptops are harvested for parts, or reused by recycling the materials. Once again, bamboo is a tool for innovation, not just because of how it looks, but for all kinds of practical considerations too.
Does anyone out there own one of these? If so, how does it differ from the standard laptop? Are you menaced by pandas at all? Tell me all about it!
In the flooring industry, there are designated tests to place each type of wood flooring on scale of which is the softest to the hardest. A point which all bamboo flooring sellers make, including us here at BuildDirect, is that bamboo floors are comparable to many species of hardwood for hardness. But, a lot of consumers simply don’t believe the hype. And other consumers are prepared to test the hype on their own.
Here’s a great blog entry by Bruce Schena on the Pope Street Modernblog. Bruce is an electromechanical engineering & product design consultant located in the San Francisco Bay Area who takes his flooring purchase pretty seriously. Basically, when sceptical about how bamboo flooring would stand up to stress, he decided to conduct his own series of scientific tests bases on the Janka Hardness test.
Basically, Bruce set up a variation of the test where he specified a certain force and measured how deeply a steel ball would sink into his range of wood flooring samples, which included strand-woven bamboo, which is widely known for being an extremely hard floor, even when compared to traditional hardwoods. Here were his findings, using his old floor (white oak) as a baseline:
Based on my data, our Teragren Synergy Strand (Wheat) Bamboo looks like a great choice - nearly twice as hard as our original floor and pretty far out on the end of the hardness scale. Our second choice - the Plyboo Strand - was the hardest of all, but only slightly more than the Teragren.
And both were harder than the white oak, a popular choice in wood flooring, the hardness of which is not usually questioned.
A choice in flooring is an investment in time, money, and in the long term value of a property. But, you’ve got to hand it to someone who is not willing to buy what it says in the sales brochure and is willing to see what the laws of physics has to say about what he’s buying. So, flooring sellers beware - be sure your product does what you say it does, lest your next customer be a product design consultant who blogs!
Cheers!
Rob.
Take a look at Bruce Schena’s site for more information about him and his work.
Bamboo knocks it out of the park again (there it is), showing its versatility in yet another field (there’s another) of human activity; the American national pastime of baseball.
Traditionally, sports equipment makers have turned to white ash hardwood for making baseball bats. Yet, in the interests of extra strength, and in looking for sustainabilty too, a balance is being struck by using composite bats. And what do is being used more and more commonly as a core? You bet - bamboo.
Here’s an article about bamboo bats featuring an interview with former Kansas City Royals third baseman George Brett. Brett and his brothers own a bat manufacturing company, Brett Brothers, stating that bats with bamboo cores are more stable, and break less than standard bats. The bats are made with real hardwood too, and are coated with kevlar, making for a very stable bat. But the bamboo is what supplies that stability at its core under stress.
Baseball fan image courtesy of Bob Jagendorf. Fantastic, isn’t it?
How many other examples of the robust nature of bamboo are there out there? . Stay tuned!
I can’t resist a pun, so forgive the title. But, there’s something about the pen being mightier than the sword which seems to bring out the pun in everyone. When I say everyone, maybe I should say that I mean me. But, I’m sure there are others. Well, not exactly sure. Never mind.
The point is (that pun was not intended - honest!) that bamboo pens are making writing green in more ways than one. Here’s an article about bamboo pens that explains that even the smallest change in buying habits are making a cultural impact. And where buying a bamboo pen may not save the world, it certainly changes perceptions about our choices as consumers, and the prevalence of plastic in manufactured items. Yet, there are efforts into making an even more direct impact on our world.
The pen in question is the new Bamboo Tornado(TM) by Retro 51which retails for about $40. That’s kind of steep for a pen, maybe. Or maybe not for some. I tend to get the ones in the pack, so that when I chew on them (which I will do), I get the most out of my investment. In any case, when you buy the bamboo tornado pen from the Retro 51 site, you’re making a donation to the Arbor Day Foundation. The organization is dedicated to saving 250 square feet of rainforest through this campaign.
If only they made chewable green pens, I could give up my plastic habit.
When you’re around building materials, talk about them a lot, and are generally proud of the company you work for, when your stuff gets on TV show you respect it’s like watching your kid in a school pageant! Well, not completely like that, but you get the idea.
We donated a few products to the “Holmes on Homes” HGTV program - some slate tile, some porcelain tile for the bathroom, and some decking too. But, we also donated some natural bamboo flooring, which was installed on the ground floor, and on the stairs too.
Here’s a video of Rob Banks our co-founder speaking to Mike Holmes about our Yanchi bamboo flooring on the program. The full episode is called “Pasadena 911″.:
Mike Holmes is a major figure in Do-It-Yourself circles here in Canada. He’s known for being something of a home reno superhero, coming in with his guys ‘n’ girls to fix the disasters caused by disreputable contractors. The reason he does it is really to protect his industry, and let people know that getting ripped off by someone who doesn’t know what they’re doing is not characteristic of the industry itself. And more importantly, that dishonesty and shoddy work shouldn’t be tolerated by homeowners.
He also genuinely cares about helping people out of desperate situations, including the staggering costs and financial uncertainty that they bring. As such, we here at BuildDirect are big fans, which is why we wanted to get involved in this program. This was Mike’s first job in the United States, and we were really stoked about helping him as best we could, and the family who needed his help.
Thanks to Mike and his production team for having us on his show. It was kind of a rush for us to be a part of what he’s doing for the contractor industry in our own small way. And nice to be on TV too, who are we kidding!
Here at BuildDirect, we sell bamboo flooring. This is for a variety of reasons, having to do with how green it is, how hard and durable it is, how great it looks, and because more and more people are gravitating toward it. Of course on this blog, I’ve talked a bit about some of the other uses of bamboo too, from framing materials, to scaffolding, to temporary shelters.
But, I really wanted to get a sense of how far reaching bamboo is as the basis for a range of products outside of the construction industry. Can bamboo be applied to more personal, and more fun applications for instance? Since bamboo is derived from the Far East, I wondered specifically about spa treatments, just because many spas derive their practices from that same region of the world. Well, it seems that the answer is a resounding ‘yes’!
In checking out some of the products you’ll find at the local spa, I found some pretty amazing ones you can buy online for use at home too. Here is a selected list of them, just so you have some ideas for the coming holiday season:
Bamboo foot-files- Get that rough layer of skin off of the bottoms of your feet, with a material that can take the strain.
Bamboo scalp massager - use a sustainable and durable material to get the blood flowing, and the mind clear again!
Bamboo scrub - Not only does it make great flooring, it also has the power to exfoliate!
Bamboo bath mats- For the feel of a real spa underfoot, bamboo bath mats are moisture-resistant as well as eye-catching.
Bamboo combs and hairbrushes - Use a species of grass to make your hair look less like a tangled grassland.
Bamboo bathrobes, socks, and towels - you want super-absorbing material after treatment? Bamboo will provide it and then some!
And these are just a few I found. You can do a search yourself using Google to see about pricing and availability. The point of all this of course is to reinforce the idea that bamboo is becoming more and more mainstream and in a variety of ways. And this is not just about flooring trends or changing construction practices.
The impact bamboo seems to be having is on a wider global scale, and across cultures too . And given the importance of sustainability and the need for alternative materials in nearly every sphere of life, it’s kind of encouraging that bamboo is making such a splash in the great mineral bath of consumer culture.
Bamboo is not just for practicality – it can be fun too. Of course, the fact that bamboo is practical helps the fun to last a while longer than it might with a lot of other materials.
California company Bamboo Sk8 has undertaken the promotion of a new kind of skateboard – one made from bamboo. Traditionally, skateboards have been made from maple. Yet, with sustainability issues coming to the fore, what was needed was an alternative, preferably a material which is sustainable, flexible, and just as durable if not more so.
Since we’ve found bamboo to demonstrate all of these qualities in the bamboo flooring we sell, it makes sense to me that bamboo serves the skate industry just as well.
Here’s a video which the company has included on their website of how the company is promoting these new boards:
It’s kind of weird to see kids trashing their maple boards, with the phrase ‘maple sucks’ in order to get a bamboo board (or ‘deck’ as the kids are calling them…). It seems incongruous to the idea of sustainability and preservation of maple forests, which is an idea put forward here. Surely if you really wanted to preserve the environment, you’d find a way to re-use your old board, rather than just turn it into landfill fodder.
Maybe it’s just me being an old fart. Hey, you kids! Get off my lawn!
In my view, I’m looking at the practical implications. For me, ultimately this idea of a bamboo skateboard is more about how durable bamboo is. It’s yet another example of how versatile and well-suited it is for use as an object like a skateboard, which is designed to stand up to physical stress for a long period of time.
We’ve come a long way since the 1970s, when skateboards were made out of plastic!
Sustainability and finding new ways of doing things in an era when conservation is a necessity and not a theory, innovation has once again come to the fore in the world of construction. I love when that happens!
I was reading an article about a product called GluBam, which is a bamboo-derived beam made for structures like house framing and, yes, bridges. It’s inventor is Yan Xiao, a civil engineer in China who studied in the States before returning to China to see about alternative building materials there. Construction limitations in that country due to a lack of affordable building materials in rural areas of the country, and the collapse of several buildings including schools in Sichuan Province in May of this year during massive earthquakes have made this type of effort a priority. A little creativity was needed to come up with a viable solution.
Xiao was a kite builder when he was a kid, using bamboo frames to keep his creations together. In taking his inspiration from his childhood (a rich vein in the innovation stakes a lot of the time…), he developed GluBam lumber in an effort to create a bamboo-based framing product that is easily adaptable to a wide range of construction projects. Since the development of GluBam, he’s built a 33-foot bridge which has the capacity to support eight tons in the rural area of Sichwan Province. Additionally, he’s applying it to the construction of safer classrooms.
In the article, it’s hoped that this kind of innovation using bamboo as a key building material will inject new life into the Chinese economy. Personally speaking, if the use of bamboo for building results in fewer lives lost during natural disasters, then any efforts and costs in development will easily be worth it.
I am continually amazed by the strength of bamboo. I’ve talked here a lot about how versatile bamboo is, of course. But, I was reading an article about bamboo as a structural component, and some of the most amazing points were raised about bamboo and how widely it is used in construction all over the world.
Included among those points in the article were that:
Bamboo has the same tensile strength-to-weight ratio as steel, and is stronger than concrete while being lightweight too. Steel? Concrete? Really?
An estimated one billion people worldwide live in homes which incorporate bamboo as a structural element.
The ZERI Pavillion built for the World Expo in Hanover Germany was built using reinforced bamboo as supporting beams. This was done as a means to establish bamboo as a construction material, not simply as a material purely for design.
The ZERI pavilion, Hanover Germany
One of the main challenges to putting bamboo forward as a mainstream construction material is the very traditional nature of that industry, particularly in North America. It will be interesting to see how much headway these types of efforts will make before the end of the decade, given the recent shift toward green building.
I am of the opinion that there is great potential for world peace through the use of baked goods. After all, everybody loves freshly baked bread, don’t they? While running about like headless chickens, it’s a pretty common thing to be stopped in one’s tracks by the smell of baked bread. And in that moment, all of the troubles in that busy life seem to be a little less important.
Well, thanks to Bamboo-Bag.com, beloved and versatile bamboo has a part to play in this universal experience of bread-induced euphoria. The company makes cloth containers for baguettes, which are called ‘baguette quivers’, which is kind of cool - well, cooler than ‘baguette bags’. Here’s how they work (from the site):
The baguette quiver can comfortably hold up to three long loaves. The top of the bag closes with a drawstring to keep the bread both safe during transit and fresh, outside the refrigerator, after the bread arrives home. The quiver is made to be worn with the long front strap diagonally across the chest so that the wearer’s arms remain free for riding a bicycle, carrying other groceries, or handling a stroller. The loaf pouch is able to contain two one-pound loaves or a single challah bread (link mine).
But why choose bamboo fiber? Well, it seems that among other benefits, bamboo is anti-microbial and anti-fungal. Along with a great benefit to flooring surfaces, which is kind of our department, when it comes to textiles and food applications, bamboo fabric makes a lot of sense on this front.
In addition, bamboo is chosen because it keeps the bread fresh for a longer period of time. I’m not sure why this would be, other than the fact that bamboo is native to tropical regions, and naturally manages moisture more so than other plant-derived materials. Maybe I’ll send them an email about that.
Still, the point is that in addition to bamboo being tremendously versatile, very sustainable, and ultimately resulting in some pretty stylish products, it also adds to the freshness of locally baked bread. If there is a way to save the world with sustainability and the wonders of baked goods on its list of accomplishments, we will owe bamboo big!
Bamboo-bag.com is based in Berkely California with multiple locations.
Thanks to Kate Trgovac for the referal to their site!
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Here’s an article about bamboo laptops which talks a bit more about how bamboo laptops are making a fashion statement, but also seeing to certain safety issues too. According to the article, a lot of laptops, when discarded and replaced by this year’s model, are sent to the Third World where they are often stripped for parts.
Here’s a great blog entry by Bruce Schena on 
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