The Slickest Thing (Part Six in a Series)
19 February 2008Having completely exhausted myself in my last blog, I found myself simply moving the pencil, writing what must surely have seemed like gibberish. I proposed planting a sustainable forest that could be grown like grass, harvested like grass, and then grown again… like grass. Well, as it turns out, we really can do something like that.
Particleboard, for those who may not know, is made of sawdust which is bonded together with glues to make it into a useable sheet. It helps conserve resources in the sense that it helps a mill make full use of the lumber it processes. Before its invention, sawdust was mostly burned; now it is utilized for other products. But, still, a number of trees that once were are no longer, and completely using them up only mitigates the environmental damage. It does not eliminate it.
A fairly recent product is wheat board or straw board, which is actually made of wheat straw, which, as it turns out, is an easily renewable resource. Every year wheat farmers are faced with the problem of removing straw residue after the annual harvest. In years past they had two choices: plow it back into the ground or burn it. Now they can sell this residue to companies who will form it into a product not unlike particleboard. It can be painted and stained like wood and can be used for interior applications such as cabinetry.
Another product, and the one that most excites me, is grass. That’s right—grass! I said we should look for a forest that acts like grass, and, as it turns out, we can simply use grass. Well, OK, it’s not grass, per se. It’s bamboo, which is actually a form of grass.
Bamboo has been used as a building material in the Eastern Hemisphere for thousands of years. In researching this blog I found that there are over a thousand species of bamboo, which, again, goes past the scope of these blogs, but the long and short of it is that the product can be used for furniture, because it has been used this way for centuries. And, like the grass it is said to be, it grows like… well, like grass. Some species of it actually grow two to four feet per day!
Best of all, bamboo, is very much a sustainable resource. They now have managed bamboo forests in China where they have learned how to cut it off at the roots in such a way that it grows again from those same roots and reaches maturity in four years! You don’t even replant it! You simply harvest it and come back in four years.
So, that, at some length, is how we got to the use of bamboo. Now the question is, what can we do with it?
Joseph
NEXT: "Using Bamboo"
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