Tag Archives: bamboo

Get the Facts on Formaldehyde in Bamboo Flooring

bamboo flooring

Bamboo is an excellent green building material. It’s fast growing, sustainable, and really beautiful. Bamboo floors are a wonderful choice when renovating or building new. But even these sustainable floors contain a bit of formaldehyde. Learn what standards to look for when purchasing and how to ensure you are not exposed to the chemical.

Bamboo – The ABCs of Green Building Materials

Bamboo is a truly remarkable green building material. It’s twice as strong as concrete and slightly stronger than steel. It’s also a renewable resource that needs little energy to grow, prevents soil erosion, provides biomass, offers wildlife refuge, and produces a healthy food supply for both wildlife and humans. Offering significant remediation from the effects…

Bamboo, Plastic Bottles Make Eco-Friendly Greenhouse

Hanoi architecture firm 1+1>2, in collaboration with Action For The City, has designed an eco-friendly greenhouse that protects growing plants from the elements, provides a place for farmers to rest and a offers a creative play space for children to learn more about their environment. It also offers a break from the visual sameness of…

10 Earth-Friendly Building Materials for Earth Day

Borrowing from Discovery.com’s 2012 top ten list of natural building materials, here are ten earth-friendly building materials, some old and some new. 1. Rock Locally sourced rock is the most earth-friendly, due to short transportation distances.  Extraction may be the most energy intense part of the life cycle of this material.  Rocks can be mortared together…

Guest Post: Green Construction Trends

The Green movement has reached the construction trade. From affordable public housing that has adopted green construction methods — such as ergonomically designed furniture in common areas and the use of sustainable, renewable building materials — to the use of green building standards throughout the country, construction companies are embracing the opportunity to construct eco-friendly…

Guest Post: Seasonal Landscaping

Landscaping is not limited to those with the green thumb or professional gardeners. It can be done by anyone even if you have no experience in gardening. A good eye for space and scale, a dash of creativity, and a touch of color are all you need to create a beautiful landscape. There are many…

Bamboo Building: Good or Bad for the Environment

Bamboo has been lauded for its in home construction and building; however, some concerns have risen with the popularity of bamboo, including biodiversity, soil erosion, and chemical use.

A DAtE with Disaster: Design Against the Elements 2011 Winner is Announced

DAtE is a global architectural competition meant to find solutions to the problems occurring due to climate change. “Climate change refers to the variation in the Earth’s global climate or regional climates over time scales ranging from decades to millions of years. Changes may be driven by internal processes, external forces or, most recently, by human activities.” This is the third competition of its kind all originating in the Philippines with the winner being announced in early 2011.

Bamboo in America

Until now, almost all of the bamboo in products sold here has come from overseas. That could change soon, as new planting techniques may lead to millions of new acres of bamboo shoots in the American South.