Why isn't bamboo wood a bigger industry? | Hacker News Reader

Why isn't bamboo wood a bigger industry?

quora.com

210 pointstomcam98 comments

Bamboo isn't going to replace lumber for most permanent uses, but it sure is handy when you need to put something together in a pinch.

I was once trekking in northern Thailand with some Akha hill tribe guides. When it was time for dinner, they cut down a large bamboo and within minutes fashioned essentially a complete dinner service out of it:

* A framework for their overnight hut/lean-to

* A pot for boiling rice

* A frame to hold the pot over an open fire

* Bowls for serving and eating

Crappy pics:

http://www.patokallio.name/photo/travel/Thailand/ChiangDao/C...

http://www.patokallio.name/photo/travel/Thailand/ChiangDao/F...

(...and obviously the darker pieces of bamboo were reused from previous camps.)

Wow, those bowls are great, yet so simple. It's amusing to think they'd probably be about £25 each from John Lewis.

Maybe they'd need some kind of treatment to last?

I'd buy them, but it would have to be a set for £25, and on sale during one of the 100 sales they have each year.

Side Note: I don't know why they haven't made their way stateside, they are one of my favorite department stores. Always clean, friendly staff, toilets are impeccable (though that might just be a British thing).

John Lewis? It's insanely expensive and the variety of products is risible.

I remember looking at the pans and the fans this summer. There were more options above £100 than below. There was hardly anything basic and certainly not at a basic price.

When my vacuum cleaner died last year, I went to look for another one and they didn't have any except Dyson and its luxury competitors.

It's often cheaper than Amazon for the market segment it serves.

I don't think 'JL has more pans above £100 than below' is any more valid a complaint than 'Target has more pans below $100 than above'.

(I've been to a Target once, sorry if that's not accurate, but I'm sure you see what I mean and can substitute something that is!)

I don't know about the luxury market segment, didn't try to compare there. I'm trying to illustrate that they are not competing on the low to medium range.

Going there a few times only to find nothing and have to buy on Amazon. Ain't going again.

IMO they're ignoring a big market segment and they are missing out on customers. Maybe it works out in the city and canary wharf but I doubt it would fare well in the less affluent countryside.

Hey very cool. Not exactly related, but if you are interested, I have an adventure journalling side-project I am working on. I would love to have more techie travel/adventure loving folks on board... https://outsideways.com/

looks cool, signing up now :)

Cool!

Those pics made my day.

And it's helpful to be reminded that, as techies - our skills just aren't that special or useful.

It depends. When I was around there, they had some trouble with solar panels. Talking to them, they had no clue at all about electricity (just like many first-world dwellers I guess - and probably not enough money to get somebody who has to come fix things). If a techie teamed up with them, they could make so much stuff, like powering a generator with a water wheel in the river - easier to understand, and all the problematic parts are what they are good at.

Those bamboo "bowls" - the long half-pipes - look cool. There seems to be a banana leaf plate in the photo too, like I said in another comment here.

http://www.patokallio.name/photo/travel/Thailand/ChiangDao/C...

Same thing in the Philippines. I lived there for a bit, and the locals made all sorts of stuff out of bamboo and random leaves, both for themselves and for tourists. My favorites were:

- banana leaves as table cloths and food wraps - bamboo for temporary structures, tools, and toys - palm fronds (or something similar) as rope/packaging

It's also really fast to regrow, so it's super renewable.

Here in the US, it's mostly used as a wood alternative (desks, flooring, etc), but it's so much more versatile than that.

Is there a pic of the pot? I can't understand how you hold a wooden pot over fire without it burning, and how it can conduct the heat into the water, or how the water was even held in it without leaking.

The "pot" was just a segment ("cell"?) of bamboo with the top lopped off. I was surprised to see this as well, but I presume the water within kept the bamboo from catching fire.

Relatives that lived in Japan brought back bamboo stuff to the US, and it all cracked within a year or so.

The reason was that bamboo does well in wet climates where the moisture in the air keeps in flexible. (or something like that) But in the US, it's much drier (most places) than in Japan.

This fits with my experience of bamboo furniture over the years as well. It becomes brittle and fragile the older it gets. But oak/pine/maple don't seem to suffer this fate nearly as bad.

I don't doubt what you're saying, but I wonder why my bamboo ski poles don't crack. I have lots of them, and they've been used every winter for nearly forty years, from back when I bought them. They're as good as new, still. I bought all the stock of the last shop selling them at the time, in my student town, as I didn't want to use fiber or metal poles in the mountains (can't easily be fixed if they break, while bamboo poles can be fixed if they split, and, with some tape, can even be prevented from breaking in the first place).

I am sure they are treated differently? Just a guess, but maybe with an epoxy?

Bamboo is anisotropic like timber, which means that expansion and contraction caused by drying or temperature variation will happen at different rates along the tangential, longitutional and radial axis. Crack happens when stress exceed the tensile strength of the material in one direction. Thus a long and thin object is less vulnerable to this type of failure as only one axis undergoes a significant change in size.

In addition, the bamboo ski poles may have been thoroughly dried by kiln heating and sealed with some type of resin or lacquer to prevent moisture ingress, especially if they were made to get wet.

I suspect you are correct in your assumptions in the last paragraph, at least about being kiln heated. That seems very likely. There is also a thin layer of something, could be resin or lacquer as you suggest. It is definitely not epoxy though (re. next poster)

The other poster was probably thinking about bamboo fibre-epoxy composite which is more like fibreglass.

I vaguely remember the sealant is not really food safe, which is why many bambio utensils still crack after a few years.

There are a few companies making new bamboo ski poles. Panda Poles and Soul Poles are two that I see regularly on the mountain.

I have engineered bamboo "wood" flooring that I like a lot and after a few years haven't noticed any cracking or warping; perhaps it went through more extensive treatment processes?

Flooring - first it's cut into strips, then boiled in a solution to remove the starchy compounds, then dried and pressed, then planed down for a lamination process, laminated (using typically more epoxy than other lumber-based laminates), then cut into the final form for the end user. Bamboo is a grass, and it's hollow - it neither looks nor handles like real lumber. It's often touted as a "greener" alternative to lumber - given the amount of energy and additives I'm not so sure this is the case: I would love to see someone actually do an analysis of this.

I would love to see a website where I could just enter two alternatives and get the greener one. I find it hard to make any decision these days. Should I buy tomatoes in a can a paper+plastic container? Fish sauce from Thailand in a glass or plastic bottle? Should I buy a small item in a nearby shop or drive somewhere a buy bigger packs. Someone should solve it for me.

This is a hard problem though, there are so many variables. For example, maybe the one that is more eco-friendly to produce is less durable and in the example of flooring which one is more green could depend on how many people a day you have walking on it and what they weigh.

Also economies of scale have an impact too. An expensive eco-friendly product might be produced in smaller numbers causing more waste through the supply chain.

This is all speculation -- but products made a scale are often made with high efficiency.

What surely works is when we ask big corporations to do the right thing. Or if we managed to tax environmental impact.

1) buy as little as possible - buy used if possible.

2) buy as cheap as possible.

3) invest your money in green initiatives.

That way I don't think you'll go all wrong.

Wouldn't you then get stuck in a local maxima?

Your tomato example probably depends on the time of year, your location, the farm. And even then how are you storing it? Fridge? Cupboard? So probably not generally answerable.

I know Tesco (a uk supermarket) started labelling with embodied CO2, but gave up.

I do agree with you though. Even some marketing regs, so when someone claims something is greener, it actually is.

Well, for one thing, it grows incredibly fast, and spreads like a weed (some types, anyway).

"engineered" is the key word here. I too have bamboo flooring. When cutting pieces to fit I noticed a distinct epoxy/chemical smell foreign to what I'd encountered when cutting standard red oak flooring.

The epoxy chips easily if you drop anything heavy and pointed on it.

It does look good and flexes if you don't glue it down and run an underlay.

It's like building a wooden strip canoe - by the time you're finished with the sanding, fiberglass, resin, etc. it's more of a fiberglass canoe that looks like wooden strips.

Can you oil it to prevent this from happening? I have several Bamboo cutting boards that have lasted for years because I oil them frequently. I also do this with wooden spoons and other un-finished wood products.

That is the problem, bamboo stuff actually requires specific care in the US that it doesn't in Japan. I was going to buy some really nice bowls there, and my sister suggested I not do it because they would break in the US, but not in Japan. (with the equivalent care)

I have a bamboo cutting board that I've been using for about 10 years and it's still as good as new. Perhaps it was treated specially, because I've never done anything special to care for it (and had no idea that might be necessary).

I also have some bamboo spoons and spatulas that get used almost daily and they have lasted for many years as well. I wash them in the dishwasher, which perhaps gives them the level of moisture needed to stay good.

Your bamboo cutting board is likely made in a manner similar to bamboo flooring as outlined in the article - a lot of treatments to make it stable and usable.

If it needs around the same humidity levels as Japan, then bamboo might be good in places like Florida, Louisiana, and Houston at least.

As a wood worker, the answer on the post does agreat job. I will add only one more point. Wood working in 99% of cases does not lead to deforestation. In most countries it is hard to buy illegal wood. In South Africa we buy mostly pine where 2 trees are planted for every one sold. These forestries are heavily regulated and protected. They are businesses. The deforestation you usually hear about is in third world countries and not for wood sales but rather for land gain or things like palm oil.

If you are buying wood from a hardware outlet you can pretty much be guaranteed that it is safe wood. Many trees are protected by law nowadays.

In most cases, buying wood products actually increases tree mass globally and decreases pollution.

Buy wood products when you can. You will be planting more trees and decreasing pollution.

In terms of product lifecycle, there's no doubt that wood (or bamboo) is a good choice of material, plants are pulling CO2 out of the atmosphere and as long as what's built is maintained, that CO2 will remain sequestered. Contrast that with metals (which have to mined and processed, using huge amounts of energy) or plastics (from fossil fuels, also a headache to dispose of). Not to mention wood has grain, making it pleasant to look at.

There's a YouTube channel (0) that uploads videos from a girl in China building things out of bamboo, watching her work is entrancing: https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=LTejJnrzGPM

[0] I think the channel is fan made and she actually posts them to a Chinese social media site.

The channel is hosted by a fan but owned by the girl, she uploads her actual content to a short-video site

I’m not entirely comfortable with the ethics of this but one great opportunity is going to be content arbitrage, especially between Chinese internet sites and then greater world’s. There are some pretty funny memes coming out of Tik Tok now.

Content arbitrage has been a thing inside China for a few years, particularly due to the Great Fire Wall blocking a great deal of websites. Quite a few accounts exist on Wechat and Weibo that aggregate memes and viral videos from Youtube and Twitter.

A few prominent Chinese video creators have made their way to launch official Youtube channels. Chinese-language Youtube has been experiencing a boom since 2015 due to increasing numbers of international students living abroad, proliferation of VPNs, and users in HK/TW.

I feel that a lot of concern about replacing wood is misplaced or fails to properly differentiate between different species of wood harvested in different locations.

America has a mix of forests for nature preservation, recreation, and lumber production. The latter are very well managed, with loggers very careful to replace all the trees they remove with saplings so their sons and daughters have something to harvest in 50 years. The total result is that the number of US trees has doubled in 70 years, and were actually back up to 2/3 of the estimated 1600s tree count. I personally have no qualms about consuming American harvested hardwood, because I know that it’s part of a successful forestry program that’s planting more trees than it takes.

Now the one place the above doesn’t apply are South American and African hardwoods, which are currently not super well managed. So feel free to enjoy your Oak or Cherry floors, but maybe pass on the Mahogany and Teak.

What part of the states do you live in?

Lumber in the three states in my area is harvested in a completely unsustainable manner. Loggers will purchase the rights to log from farmers, and clear-cut every single piece of whatever is popular at the moment (black walnut right now, Ash and Maple in the 90's). No plan to replant, other than if nature itself makes a recovery.

California.

Sure, there are bad actors occasionally that need to be clamped down on. But it's hard to argue on the whole that the US' forest management isn't a massive success based on the stats from above.

Are you in the southeast US? A generation ago, so many investors planted trees that it's all but worthless now once you consider the costs of bringing the lumber to market. I imagine that a lot of people just want to liquidate their holdings and get whatever money they can back.

Either way, current estimates are that we're consuming about 42% of the lumber that's growing per year. I'm personally ok with this.

This article makes no mention of biomass per acre when farmed.

As a C4 photosynthesis plant, bamboo presumably grows more biomass per year than other trees.

If true, that would seem significant enough to outweigh many of the disadvantages.

Big if true!

Iirc, there’s a bamboo tree that grows very fast and has been considered for carbon sequestration. But the problem is, as with all trees, the carbon isn’t locked away from the atmosphere. It also takes up valuable farm land as they need something more like marshland than drier, more common land.

What if they (like trees) just bury it very deeply? Oil and gas are basically old trees and sea life that was buried - stored, and would have been for a very long time if it wasn't due to people.

I’ve wondered this as well. I bet the carbon expense to emplace the bamboo deep enough in the ground prohibits any benefits.

You can make charcoal from it which generates some heat from burning but doesn’t release near as much of the carbon. Then you can treat the charcoal to make terra preta, which is a soil additive that lasts centuries and encourages soil formation and carbon retention itself.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Terra_preta

Commonly known as “biochar”, particularly among permaculturists:

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Biochar

I have about 2 dozen clumps of Bambusa Lako that screen out the neighbours and are around 40-50ft tall. At this time of year a new shoot grows about 20-30cm a day.

But while they grow quickly, being mostly hollow they are a fraction of the weight of a similar length tree branch.

You can pick one up easily.

Leaves however are a different story - they drop an enormous amount of leaves!

The leaves don't compost easily like grass and are terrible to burn. They do make a good mulch similar to sugar cane otherwise you're filling a bin every week with leaves!

If it doesn't rain for a few months the leaves all yellow and they start to die off like grass, but they don't need that much water.

The impact of shipping bamboo from where it grows to where the lumber is needed might also need be considered for completeness. Now, I don't know how you define biomass but would be inetersting to see numbers. Just from the looks: ok those big bamboo species grow way closer together than oak for instance, but on the other hand an oak tree grows much thicker and the wood per cubic is almost certainly going to be heavier so things might cancel out?

for the most part, yea. but there are places in the US it grows pretty well, so long as the land isn't more valuable for something else.

Sea freight is remarkably cheap.

But not too ideal when it comes to air pollution and CO2. Would require comparisions with more local wood transported over land and/or river though to make factual statements about it I guess.

Sea freight is less CO2 per ton mile than any other type of transport:

https://timeforchange.org/co2-emissions-shipping-goods

> The following table shows the amount of CO2 (in grams) emitted per metric ton of freight and per km of transportation

Something shipped on truck from nearby will be doing a lot less kilometers total and produce much less total emissions. Usually shipping something around the world will use those less efficient transport methods to complete the trip anyway, so it's an addition and not a replacement.

I wonder how it compares to rubberwood. Rubberwood has to be cut down (and used as lumber, etc.) and replanted as yield diminishes beyond biability. The downside of rubberwood is it does poorly in damp climates.

The list of uses is missing the best one: clothing!

Bamboo fabric is very soft and comfortable, if you haven't tried it yet you should!

Downside: it doesn't last as long as cotton, and takes a bit longer to dry after washing.

It's also missing scaffolding. Bamboo is often used to make construction scaffolding in areas where it is abundant.

Also probably missing some uses in the existing categories e.g. pellet fuels (grasses, rice or wheat husks and papers are already pelletised so no reason why bamboo would not be). Though I guess the ash factor issue remains.

I can confirm on scaffolding. Having traveled in Asia a fair share, I have come across some interesting creations with bamboo scaffolding. It's incredible to see just how much the material can hold above itself without breaking.

Yes, I forgot to mention that in my other comment about bamboo in this thread. In India, bamboo scaffolding is or used to be (not checked lately) very commonly used on the outsides of buildings when they were being constructed. Tied together with ropes, in vertical and horizontal directions. The building workers stand / climb on them and do the building work.

idk if it is the best use, you need pretty nasty chemicals to make the fibers.

Interesting. I did a bit of reading about the process, and it seems like it doesn't have to be a problem - "bamboo cellulose is suitable for a closed-loop viscose process that captures all solvents used."

I wouldn't assume that all factories in China et al implement such a design and take worker safety into account, though.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bamboo_textile

Be aware that the clothing isn't made of bamboo fibres in the way someone would expect, especially based on how it's advertised.

They are generally Viscose rayon but use bamboo as the cellulose source rather than wood. I think several companies have been fined/prosecuted/told off for misleading advertising.

Bamboo fabric is rayon, which is a semi-synthetic plastic. It's not at all clear this is good for the environment - according to this study, more than half the plastic microfibres in seawater are rayon:

https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2014/12/141216212253.h...

I just remembered that I have a kitchen table made of bamboo.. just the top surface, not the legs (which are made from ordinary wood). It's technically not a kitchen table, it was sold as an office desk, but it works very well as a kitchen table (and it had the exact right dimensions we needed, which is why we bought it). The surface is slightly rough, as it's made from long thing bands of bamboo fiber. All in all it's turned out to be a great table.

It's so weird that this came up today because I was just reading all about this yesterday. I was looking into buying bamboo socks because it sounded like they'd be more sustainable, but as I did more research I found that the most common process to produce bamboo rayon/viscose involves a solution of toxic chemicals that mostly can't be reused, and that the material produced doesn't even retain the beneficial properties of bamboo.

There is also the closed-loop process that reuses most of the chemicals and that material is called lyocell (branded TENCEL®), but I don't think most people who purchase clothing with bamboo cloth know the difference and I believe it has to be expressly labeled as such.

Bamboo, coconut, neem and maybe banana are considered "wonder trees or plants", IIRC, because each has many uses. Banana maybe a bit less than the other three. Also garlic for health (neem is known for health uses but also has many uses).

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Azadirachta_indica

In India neem cake (residue after extracting oil from neem seeds) is fed to cattle and used as an organic fertilizer (IIRC, as are some other oilseed cakes, some of them are used as feed in aquaculture too), fresh young neem leaves are made into a paste/curry and eaten in some states (good for purifying the blood and skin and getting rid of worms), neem twigs are used as toothbrushes (the germicidal properties help), neem oil is applied on cattle (and sometimes humans use it) to keep away flies and insects, etc. etc.

For banana, apart from eating the ripe fruit, in southern states at least, the raw fruit is also cooked, the flowers and stems are also eaten as vegetables in curries (dry or wet), the leaves are used as plates for eating (thrown after one use), etc.

It's really amazing the number of different uses that many plants and trees have been put to, traditionally. I read a lot about this for Indian plants in a government research institute's publications some time ago. Fuel, food, timber, other construction material, medicine (both external and internal), are some of the uses known.

Moringa (drumstick) and jackfruit are two others.

Maybe they should focus on the carbon capture aspects (which are remarkable, bamboo grows fast) and try to work around the other issues

Does bamboo aggregate exists?

Though cellulose to fuel is kinda promising and still something to be cracked (pun intended), maybe it will never work.

Thank you for sharing this. I have been wondering about bamboo's utility for paper & packaging, to perhaps displace some plastic. This article has a better roundup of the state of things.

FWIW, Last time I asked about this, I found Ecoplanet Bamboo Group is trying to address some of the short-comings:

http://www.ecoplanetbamboo.com

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ecoplanet_Bamboo_Group

http://www.ecoplanetbamboo.com/fsc-certification

IMO bamboo can't be a bigger thing than wood simply because:

- bamboo cultivation came from not-much-developed countries, so not much good for us and not much easy to develop for them;

- bamboo duration, even with not so cheap treatments, is far less than the wood;

- bamboo fire resistance is very low, even with not so cheap treatments;

There is a trend in the western for bamboo simply because we consume more wood than natural regeneration and we need cheaper alternatives but this trend is really limited to consumer stuff, not structural/real architecture one as many do in some Asian and south-American countries...

I’m not a big fan of bamboo as a hardwood for all the reasons listed above. But the stuff does make some rather lovely, but expensive, flyrods.

In warm, wet climates, it appears to work pretty well to make buildings out of bamboo, if you leave it looking like bamboo instead of turning it into lumber. For example: https://qz.com/367284/spectacular-bamboo-architecture/

Is there a pressing need to replace wood? I think, at least in the USA, most wooden goods are made from cheap soft woods that grow quickly, and can basically be treated as an agricultural commodity. Are trees inefficient at converting light/water/nitrogen to cellulose?

Well i think it's more that bamboo grows significantly faster than even the cheapest woods.

FFS some species of bamboo can grow over an inch an hour!

Yes, I don't have data (can be looked up), but I've read that some bamboo species grow really fast.

There's also this interesting and devastating phenomenon I read about a while ago: in some places where bamboo grows (IIRC, one or more of the north-eastern Indian states, like Assam, is one of them), there are periodic famines or at least great shortages of food, and hence human deaths or migration, due to rats breeding like mad due to bamboo's flowering (which the rats eat - could be flowers or seeds) or something, every some number of years, and then when the bamboo food is over, they invade human habitation to continue getting food. Not sure if it is a solved problem yet.

Update: Just googled about it:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mautam

I have a bamboo plant(s) in my back yard. I frequently harvest a few pieces here and there for projects that need light, flexible materials. Very convenient.

You would think quora learned their lesson about forcing uses to login just to browse the site after they got hacked. Apparently not.

Great Question... and one I think about a lot. I work for a company called BamCore -- we make prefab home materials out of bamboo (wall systems for right now, but hoping to expand our product portfolio to include the entire building envelope). I have tried to outline the below with reasons why today bamboo is still considered niche in the west, and why I am so bullish on it breaking that mold in the future.

1. Supply of the good stuff is limited. There are thousands of species of bamboo, but only a handful are good for creating traditional buildings and other highly valuable commercial products. Bamboo forests make up about 3-4% of total forest cover (30-40mil ha), and the majority of it is in India and China, which means western access to the fiber is limited, and access to the really valuable fiber, is even more limited. 2. Knowledge diffusion has been limited. Because of Bamboo's geography, its mainly used in the east, and is often seen as a "poor man's" timber... an unfortuante stereotype we are trying to get around. Also, if you ask anyone what they think about bamboo in the west, they will invariably say something like "oh, we had bamboo in our backyard and we just couldn't get rid of it!!" Running bamboo, different than clumping bamboo, are more common in the temperate countries in the west and give the fiber a reputation for being rather frustrating... 3. Western timber companies create very tall barriers to entry. Companies like Weyerhaueser are massive... they, unfortunately, could rather easily shut down a budding bamboo plantation.

For all intents and purposes, bamboo is a cottage industry in most western countries. Yes, the bamboo utensils, plates, and high-end flooring are cool, but until there is a truly amazing commercial opportunity for us to showcase bamboo fiber's quite amazing properties (tensile and flexural strength in particular), timber will always be cheaper, and easier.

Now, why I think the tides may change for bamboo (particularly the Guadua, Dendrocalamus Asper, Bambusa Bambos and Textilis species).

1. Bamboo is much better than wood at sequestering carbon. over the past year, I, and a team of researchers, have undertaken a life cycle comparison of wood and bamboo's carbon sequestration effectiveness when productizing the fiber. The results were astounding and were somewhat unexpected. Bamboo's incredibly short time to maturity (6-7 years) and annual growth dynamics make it a far better sequestration engine than wood, which normally takes between 25 and 70 years. It also turns out that clear-cutting, the most popular form of harvesting wood fiber, is actually rather catastrophic for carbon flowing from growth to captured in product. In fact, on average only about 35% of the carbon that a tree stand captures makes it into a product (pulp, osb, paper, etc). Bamboo is never clear cut, because it grows rhizomally (its technically a grass). And therefore keeps a much higher amount of the carbon sequestered when being harvested and productized. The world seems to be somewhat waking up to the threat of climate change (unfortunately our president is still asleep)... we hope bamboo might be able to ride some of those tailwinds into becoming a more mainstream fiber source. There are also a few reforestation projects worldwide that contemplate bamboo projects.

2. There are smart people working on making bamboo fiber more popular. Besides BamCore, there have popped up a bunch of different bamboo-based companies in the US, and there are 100,000s of acres of bamboo being planted currently in Alabama by a company called Resource Fiber.

3. bamboo tech is improving rapidly. BamCore has developed a few different patented processes to make the bamboo stem into walls. Other companies are working on composites that would be as light as carbon fiber and completely bullet proof. The knowledge of how to use the fiber is still so young compared to wood, the only way to go is up.

4. Building and energy laws are going green fast. California and other states are adopting very green policy goals over the coming decades. BamCore's prefab wall system is already code commpliant, and the bamboo's natural thermal, air transmissivity, acoustic, tensile, compressive, flexural (etc etc) make it fit well with the goals of policy makers.

But, we shall see how it all pans out.

Resources: https://bamcore.com/wp-content/uploads/2018/04/BamCore-and-G... https://www.nrs.fs.fed.us/pubs/gtr/ne_gtr343.pdf https://bamcore.com/wp-content/uploads/2018/11/attachment-1....

Rubberwood. Rubberwood has seen huge growth in use in the last couple decades, particularly in furniture.

Because it splinters and falls apart.

TL;DR answer: because they're different things.

Using bamboo for building houses tends to result in using different building methods & architecture. Which can look amazing (see http://ibuku.com/). But I doubt it'd make sense to use bamboo to build my house in snowy Norway, rather than locally sourced lumber.

Your TL;DR doesn't do the answer justice IMO, especially the "Lumber" section. It's not just that they're different, it's that lumber is more versatile because it's more easy to shape it to fit your design.

I don't know anything about woodworking (or bamboo-working for that matter) but if I am to trust this Quora answer it seems that bamboo is only really good if you want bamboo-shaped elements. Otherwise you need highly processed bamboo to emulate the versatile lumber boards:

>The process is fairly involved. Typically, bamboo is harvested, leached in water to remove starches (so it does not rot so quickly) or boiled in hydrogen peroxide (or both), dried, and baked at high temperature to darken its color. Sliced into thin strips, it is arranged in layers, usually with some degree of weaving to improve strength, mixed with resins, and then subject to high temperature and pressure to set the epoxy.[10] The resulting “board” is then stained and sealed, much like a regular hardwood floor.

The cold-hardy bamboos I am familiar with are Phyllostachys nuda (running) and Fargesia genus (clumping), and I'm not sure that either would fare well in such high latitudes. It might survive in landscaping, but not as a significant lumber source.

>But I doubt it'd make sense to use bamboo to build my house in snowy Norway, rather than locally sourced lumber.

Based on other comments a bamboo house (baring some kind of treatment and/or constant maintenance) may not last long in your climate due to differences/fluctuations in humidity/temperature.

TL;DR:?Black liquor used in leaching bamboo of its high silica and its absorption rate of that silica requires expensive chemical.

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