Bamboo For Flooring

Hey Everyone - Rob Jones here.

Just to let you know, we’ve moved the posts of this blog to blog.builddirect.com. And this is also where future posts will be published. Really, it’s like we’ve moved next door - not too far away.

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Cheers,

Rob.

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There has been a lot of important discussion surrounding how various brands/types of bamboo flooring are rated for emissions.  I should say this, that my research on this is still ongoing, only because I’ve heard a lot of talk about how some kinds of bamboo flooring have zero emissions. If anyone can point me in the direction of this kind of product, I’d love to read more about it.

What I have discovered is that there are several standards to which bamboo floors are held, all of which with an eye to make improvements to the minimization of potentially harmful emissions.

Here’s a site that talks about the issue of emissions in greater detail.  Basically, off-gassing in nearly every type of flooring has been a given, from carpeting to laminate.  And in the state of California, there was a standard put in place to measure and restrict emissions for the health and safety of those living and working in the interiors in which the flooring is installed.

The California (CARB) parameters for this are currently in flux, with the goal of trying to reduce the tolerance for emmissions starting this month and projected into 2012.   The Californian standard is at 0.20 parts per million, to be improved to 0.18  ppm starting this year.

E1 is a European standard, which accounts for an allowance of 0.14 ppm, has been what our Yanchi brand has been held to.  But, more recently the new standard of E0 has been put in place too. According to Teregren, that standard is 0.07 ppm, second only to the Japanese standard of 0.05.

Obviously, the ideal is to have a bamboo floor, or any type of flooring, with zero formaldehyde emissions and have that as a standard. The balance to be struck is a glue and laminate material which is both durable in the long-term and healthy too.   And new products are coming out all of the time which are getting us closer to that goal.

Cheers,

Rob.

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Happy New Year, bamboo junkies!

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!

Cheers,

Rob.

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