Is Bamboo Clothing Truly Green?

Is this a case of bamboo can't be sustainably produced or that it just isn't being produced in a sustainable manner? Does this only apply to bamboo textiles or are the same methods used to create commonly available wood products (bowls, kitchenware, etc.) that are made from bamboo?

Bamboo seems like the perfect solution, but I've read that it can be considered unsustainable because more farmers are cutting down naturally bio-diverse forests to grow bamboo to get a piece of the action ($$$). This affects habitat for both flora and fauna. But it is sustainable in that this grass grows quickly and is rapidly renewable.

Look at the transportation of bamboo, it almost all comes from china or far overseas. I believe that the GHG emissions alone defeat the "rapid-renewable" carbon sequestration properties of bamboo by far.

The environmental impacts of clothing through washing and drying has by far the largest effect on the environment when looking at an LCA of the clothing.

On top of that it was found that a hybrid of cotton and polyester was actually less damaging on the environment because of the low amount of energy it takes to dry the clothing.

"Green" design is not as simple as choosing a "green" material.

No its not green. Treehugger answered this back at

http://www.treehugger.com/files/2005/09/bamboo_flooring.php

Way too many problems.

john at

www.woodentoy.com

Bamboo for kitchenware is produced by a very different process to that used for clothing, Liz. In the former steaming is most often used to make the material more malleable, while for clothing a fibre is obtained via dissolving the material in a solvent. For flooring a combination of heat processes and adhesive bonding are employed.

And yes, PDQ1966, as we have noted many times, on these pixels, laundering has the highest environmental impact in the life cycle of most apparel.

Course the problem with a cotton/polyester hybrid pdq1966 is that you are taking a biodegradable material and a non biodegradable yet recyclable material and weaving them together to make a monstrous hybrid. How do you recycle it? You have to take the two materials apart to upcycle them properly.
You are right in saying "green" design is not as simple as choosing a "green" material. You need to think about the smartest way to use a material for for safe return to the soil or infinite recycling.
The problem isn't bamboo, it's how we are using it.

When we first looked at making sportswear from bamboo, we ran into alot of these sustainability issues. We did however, find that bamboo charcoal embedded in recycled polyester made for a much more sustainable piece of high performance apparel. So there are some uses of bamboo that can be sustainable.

I'm a textile engineer and have been telling people this for years. No one realizes that this type of bamboo fabric is nothing more than rayon made using bamboo as the source of cellulose. The only advantage it has is in the growing of the bamboo, all the other chemical ickyness is the same.

I believe the idea behind bamboo textiles is a good one, as it can be grown locally and doesn't require pesticides, unlike cotton. However the process of which bamboo must go through in order to become yarn needs work. Otherwise we might as well buy cotton, and isn't the point of bamboo to shift away from cotton?

OK so bamboo is green but the process of getting it to yarn stage isnt. Whats the solution? Is there an eco way of making this readily available/replaceable plant a viable as a wearable fabric?

Re: drying, it is beyond me why anyone would need a dryer unless they live near to the Poles. And woe to anyone that has one AND central heating!

There is an alternative. Only buy bamboo linen that has been mechanically produced. It's more expensive & harder to find but it is ecologically much more sound. As for Eric's comment about the idea of bamboo charcoal embedded in other textiles... can anyone take a guess why this is just madness? Could it be combustion?! What is "green" about releasing smoke from burning bamboo into the atmosphere? I fail to see the point of it & it sounds like a true red herring to me. I also don't see the point of those who are adding the laundering factors into the sustainability issue or eco issue of bamboo fabric. We all have to wear clothes that will get dirty & need to be washed. That's a whole other issue which doesn't bear consideration here because whether you are wearing nylon or whether you are wearing bamboo, hemp, cotton, etc., they all have to be washed, so what's your point? On that fact, all fabrics are essentially equal save for the splitting hairs about those who refuse to dry naturally & use eco friendly soaps. Let's stick to the subject of passing along the info that bamboo isn't really a "green" product when it's transported thousands of miles away & processed by chemicals. That's enough negativity for me to hear to make my decision to only buy my local Texas organic cotton or hemp fabric, unless I can find bamboo that has been mechanically produced. I mean, really... many of us are doing the best we can to support the "greenest" companies we can. If we resort to tearing apart every single tiny thing that is wrong with the green practices of these companies we will be moving backwards again. Some people are never satisfied with progress no matter how hard we try. After all Rome wasn't built in a day!

Has anyone been to a bamboo fiber processing plant? I know that for some texile, "black bamboo" from Sichuan is used. I am interested in knowing how it gets tranported, and the energy consumption for processing.

Bamboo is good in a variety of ways, but it's clearly not perfect. But then what is? As with all these discussions the nuances are varied and the factors complex and interconnected.

We believe Bamboo IS a material for the future, so long as the process by which we create the Yarn is vastly improved. We know of a steam based system that is being developed, and we'll be keeping our eye's on that closely and maybe even help support it as a company. For what's good for us is good for everyone!

We're interested in putting our energy (and money) into addressing the challenges with Bamboo instead of simply focusing on why something doesn't work. It's exciting! We should all embrace the challenge.

Hope you're having a good day, and good on you for swotting up on Bamboo....people like you are needed and appreciated!

I recently attended the FTC workshop on green claims for textiles and building materials. The invited experts were unanimous in their opinion that while bamboo (the plant) and natural bamboo fiber is a sustainable material with many of the characteristics you mention, nearly all bamboo textiles and yarns available on the market are nothing more than rayon (viscose, in the UK). For more, see the detailed coverage in my blog:

http://nicewhitelady.blogspot.com/search/label/bamboo

Bamboo is green and eco-friendly. No one is calling it organic. There is only one step in the production process that uses chemicals, compared to many steps for most fabrics. It requires less dye and does not require dye fixatives. It has natural properties that make it superior to cotton, and certainly hemp. This is extremely important because the way cotton is grown world-wide is particularly pesticide intensive. Cotton production uses more chemicals per unit area than any other crop and accounts in total for 16% of the world's pesticides. According to the World Health Organization (WHO), 20,000 deaths occur each year from pesticide poisoning in the developing countries, many of these from cotton farming. And by the way, it is not true that farmers are replacing rainforests with bamboo crops as was said in a previous post.

If nothing else, I think it is important to keep in mind that bamboo clothing only uses a small fraction, if any of the fertilizers and pesticides that goes into the growing of conventional cotton.

Generalizations can hurt the development of bamboo as a sustainable alternative to deforestation. In northwest Ecuador we have a native giant species of woody bamboo which has been used for thousands of years. Our partner communities are looking for economic alternatives to deforestation of their remaining primary rainforests (about 15,000 acres). We are looking for investors with capital or technology for a project to restore these community's 30,000 acres of pasture lands with bamboo and producing and selling high aggregated value bamboo products.

It seems to me there are no unbiased reports on bamboo. All the would-be whistle blowers of bamboo are industries being threatened by bamboo - namely organic cotton and wood products for flooring, for example. Accept the fact that consumers need choices, and that the demand for wood and organic cotton is far exceeding supply to the point of detriment to the environment. Whenever reading pros or cons about bamboo, who is writing about it, and what interests do they represent?