Star Bamboo Singapore

Yesterday, I was gushing over the Flexible Love accordion folding chair, for its innovative use of recycled materials.

Making use of recycled material is great, but it has a big image issue. No matter how you spin it, recycled materials just sounds cheap and low-rent.

The solution to that is renewable materials.

That is why the fast-growing bamboo is the ideal eco-friendly material for flooring, and furniture too.

Bamboo poles has long been used to make furniture. But the designs were traditional and stale, essentially unchanged for decades.

Then along came bamboo flooring, and manufacturers hit upon the idea of using the material for table tops.

When we first used our bamboo material to make modern bamboo furniture, we were the first company to exhibit such products at the International Furniture Fair Singapore (IFFS) 2006.

It was a radical departure from the traditional bamboo pole furniture. Visitors were pleasantly surprised to find that our furniture were actually created from bamboo.

This tremendous interest in bamboo continued to snowball.

By the IFFS show in 2007, the awareness of bamboo reached new heights with two winners at the Furniture Design Awards with bamboo-inspired creations.

I’m sure we will see even more creative use of bamboo in furniture in the coming year.

That means more competition for us, but more choices for the eco-conscious consumer. And that can only be good.

I get asked this a lot, “Why is bamboo flooring considered an eco-friendly product?”.

Even Dr Yaacob Ibrahim, Singapore’s Minister for the Environment and Water Resources, asked me that question when we won the Silver Medal at the Eco Products International Fair in 2006.

Dr Yaacob (right) and I sharing a light-hearted moment at EPIF2006.
To the left is Dr Amy Khor, Senior Parliamentary Secretary, Ministry of the Environment and Water Resources.

Bamboo flooring is eco-friendly because it is made from one of the world’s most renewable building materials.

There are over 1,000 species of bamboo all around the world.

We use a particular species of bamboo called Moso (“??” in Chinese), which commonly found in bamboo mountains of Southern China near our factory.

This Moso bamboo matures astonishingly quickly. In just 4 to 6 years, it is ready to be harvested for production. This is also when the quality of the bamboo culm is at its peak. The quality actually drops as the bamboo ages.

Compare this to the decades typically required for hardwood trees to mature, and your choice is clear.

Why does bamboo grow so fast? It’s because it’s technically a grass, and not a tree. It’s so fast that some species have been recorded to grow at a rate of 4 feet per day!

As a bonus, it doesn’t even require replanting. The bamboo forests are inter-connected by an underground network of nodes, and new shoots will grow after harvesting.

All this means that you can enjoy beautiful hardwood floors with a clear conscience that you are not harming our natural environment.

No wonder bamboo is truly the eco-champion of building materials.