Bamboo in sustainable buildings and interiors
sustainable building materials and interiors
the case for bamboo
Welcome to episode 51 of the Green and Healthy Places podcast, in which we explore the themes of wellbeing and sustainability in real estate and interiors today.
I'm your host, Matt Morley, founder of Biofilico healthy buildings and in this episode i’m talking to my good friend Manuel Diaz Cebrian about his role in creating a new bamboo industry in Mexico.
Manuel was previously a Director at the Mexican Tourism Board in London where he managed the country’s image throughout Europe, repositioning Mexico as a cultural and culinary destination to beat.
He is now Director of Special Projects for Marbella Design Week and is launching into the world of sustainable entrepreneurship by agitating for a Mexican bamboo industry to rival that of nearby Colombia.
We discuss bamboo’s sustainability credentials, it’s various applications in sustainable buildings and interiors, its social impact benefits for indigenous peoples in Mexico, the influence of Bali’s Green School on bamboo-friendly architecture and architecture collectives around the world, and mucho mas.
Matt Morley
So you're doing really interesting work around sustainable bamboo. And it's one of those materials that has a wide understanding to some extent, but I think there's also a lot of confusion.
So why don't we start with that piece around the varieties of the bamboo as I know that it's basically a grass, but how many different varieties there are and which ones are most relevant for sustainable buildings and interiors in your opinion?
Bamboo as a sustainable building material
Manuel Diaz-Cebrian
Absolutely, I'd have to tell you, first of all, my introduction to bamboo was as a gardening ornamental plant. When I went to Bali for the first time, I was so impressed to see and stay in a hotel that was built completely of bamboo; I didn't know that sustainable bamboo had all this potential to support a structure such as a hotel building for example.
So then I came back to Europe, and especially in Mexico nobody knew that much about the potential of bamboo so I started to look at its business possibilities in Europe and North America where it is less well known.
Varieties of sustainable bamboo material
There are more than 1600 kinds of bamboo. You could imagine that the varieties will differ according to climate, to their kind of soil, altitude, etc. Every single kind of bamboo developed in different climates and characteristics of soil. But they're among these there are possibly seven used widely used in sustainable construction of buildings.
Its strength is how fast it grows, as you mentioned earlier, many people do not really understand its possibilities as a sustainable materials for interiors or buildings, OK maybe you as a healthy building consultant yes you know more than others but actually very few people know that bamboo is not a tree it is a grass.
It can grow one meter in height each week once it is 3-5 years old and it could grow up to 30 meters in height, with a width of 20cm-30cm.
Reducing the carbon footprint of buildings interiors
Matt Morley
So that brings us into the discussion around sustainability and bamboo being a fundamentally sustainable material for buildings and interiors. I know there's also some interesting information around its carbon footprint in particular, we're all I think now finally paying far more attention to the carbon footprint not just of our buildings, but also the interiors, in fact of the interior fit-out - or how much carbon are we embedding into the buildings and interiors that we're producing.
So, how does that work in terms of preventing deforestation, which I guess is to some extent explaining its advantage as a sustainable material right?
Manuel Diaz-Cebrian
So bamboo stores its own water, it’s moving up and down inside the tubes of bamboo basically, its roots are not very deep. Bamboo recovers the nutrients it needs from the soil, it is capturing carbon rather than releasing it into the atmosphere. The carbon can stay locked away for 30-40 years like that. It depends on how you use it and dispose of it.
Reducing deforestation via sustainable materials such as bamboo
Talking about deforestation, obviously no single species is a complete solution to the problem so bamboo can play a role with a multi-crop strategy to ensure biodiversity and regeneration of soil. It is less advisable to have entire jungles dedicated to bamboo alone as a mono-crop strategy.
Primarily, bamboo is going to give the soil the nutrients it needs for healthy development and regeneration. Bamboo is a tool to help us regenerate our forests in an intelligent way, it ha a role to play in that process.
I know we had to stop the forest in the forest state in our jungles and wood, but there's already a lot of plant that has been damaged. And bamboo comes as a resource to regenerate those areas that have been already destroyed.
Growing sustainable bamboo materials around the world
Matt Morley
Can bamboo only play that role in certain geographies and latitudes around the world? What are its limitations in terms of locations?
Manuel Diaz-Cebrian
It all depends on the altitude in the soil, from the climate on the humidity. Obviously the Chinese and the Asians developed it most aggressively and bamboo is a native plant from that area but it is also found in Latin America for example, as well as Indonesia of course.
In Japan, bamboo is considered a very fine material while in China it is less prestigious, almost a symbol of poverty because it was so readily available.
Now we know that sustainable bamboo can also be grown in Mexico, it’s just a matter of culture, learnign how to care for it, harvest it, treat it and turn it into sustainable building and interior products.
For example bamboo is often treated with borax to prevent bacteria killing the bamboo. It’s a successful treatment that may involve submerging the bamboo in borax for instance.
Examples of bamboo in sustainable interiors
The applications of bamboo are what we can do with it in real estate and interiors, so it can be a materials such as flooring and panels. It can be used as a tubular product for construction as in that format it has the highest capacity for being a load-bearing material in structures.
So, that gives the bamboo a certain strength, because actually in the industry of the construction or index industries, we produce them, they are the metal, tubular things because they the tubular form resist a lot of impact and way bamboo has this form and strain by nature.
And you can see this example in Bali and many in many pavilions of examples from Belize is this very well known Colombian architect, he's been actually building up pavilions and churches of bamboo in our in his natural form Joseph tubular that you will have seen and supported with engineering techniques.
uses of bamboo for architects and interior designers
Matt Morley
So you mentioned the the same tubular shape that provides inherent strength to the material. So when you in terms of those characteristics, when you're talking to architects, when you're talking to designers, what characteristics are of most relevance?
What are the things that that can ultimately make it so useful? And how is it applied in different ways not just in a tubular form but I know I've seen it come through and flooring into effectively tiles so you get into flooring tiles as an alternative to wood.
Manuel Diaz-Cebrian
The possibilities are endless! I'm gonna give you a lovely example - you could produce fabrics you could produce food, you could produce jewellery, even juices and food. So really you could use the whole thing in different ways. to produce fabric is very popular now in India, the number one country producing bamboo textiles.
Bamboo is has a great future because it's durability number one and number two the hardness and number three the rapid growth. Those three factors are the most important factors to consider all the time. It can be used in kitchens, in flooring both indoors and outdoors. Once you engineer bamboo you can create different textures, colors, and usages.
For example, there is a hotel in in the Netherlands in Amsterdam called Hotel Jakarta mainly made from bamboo combined with other woods.
Why is important for the architects or the people in the construction industry to use bamboo. Well, first of all, for the three characteristic as I mentioned earlier, there's durability, strength and agility and obviously the hardness but the other one is just to support the sustainability of this resource. The more demand, the more we can support a boom in bamboo.
What is preventing bamboo from becoming a more widely used sustainable material?
The problem we have is that people are still very non aware of the opportunity for bamboo. I’m involved in creating a network of growers of bamboo in Mexico, for example. Obviously, compared to Asia, in Latin America, the industry for bamboo is very small. But this is more because we didn't know the potential, or how amazingly profitable it could be.
Because obviously, we didn't know how to use it or what to do with it as a sustainable material. We want people to learn how to take advantage of the durability of the material and the demand for it in treated form. That is what' is missing at the moment in Mexico.
Matt Morley
So I think that's what I find so interesting about what you're working on here, this project of effectively creating or reinventing the bamboo industry for a country like Mexico. So as I see it, you've got effectively three levels, right you have the producers, you have the crops, you need the space, you need the fields, you need the farmers to produce it and look after it.
Then there's the processing / treatment piece in the middle. And then a final piece, which is around the sales and communication and the distribution of where it goes to the end consumers which we've just covered some that bit in the middle, between the growers, and those who purchase the refined product. What does that what does that look like?
Or what could that look like in Mexico who's doing that refinement of the raw material and turning it into a product? Or how could that look in a in a new industry in Mexico?
Manuel Diaz-Cebrian
Let me go back to something as important mentioned, John Hardy created the Green School, which is the School of Bamboo in Bali years ago. He fell in love with bamboo. And they discover all the boundaries of this material. And then through the years, they created the Green School of bamboo in order to educate people on its potential. So it started being a school for children, and then became a school for architects.
John's Hardy daughter is a famous architect now too, she's the one that came back to the roots of her father, now she's one of the most popular and famous architects focused on bamboo buildings construction. The Green School has educated a lot of architects worldwide.
Interestingly, these architects and their word of mouth has created a lot of small collaborative groups that are now dedicating their lives to work and teach people what to do with bamboo. why it was important to harvest to harvest it, why where you can do it, how you could go with the bamboo not necessarily being rich, but actually how do you use it.
There is a famous architect in Mexico, she is working on a program that is started in Thailand about how to build your own house using bamboo? How incredible is that - teaching people to grow bamboo and build their own house with the material they have grown.
Social impact and sustainable bamboo
One of the reasons I’m getting into the bamboo industry in Mexico is because obviously the countryside in Mexico, Latin America is kind of cool. So bamboo is certain areas that are tropical, have been achieved those, they the coffee industry, I know the industry has really damaged our jungles and on our land tremendously so integrating bamboo into the selection of natural resources that you could use in a particular habitat partially resolves that issue rather than damaging the soil further.
So the whole idea is for indigenous people get a benefit from harvesting the bamboo, make the main number more profitable. And also not only for the construction, or use it as well as decoration items, for chairs, for lamps, all the stuff in red to get the added value of the bamboo. Because not everything is used on the construction, some leftovers are thrown away. The whole idea is to teach people how to take the benefit from the whole bamboo stem.
Colombia is the most advanced country already in this industry as they started years ago but Mexico has great potential too!
How are you helping to create a sustainable bamboo industry in Mexico?
First of all, you got to create the union of producers of bamboo, because they're kind of separated at the moment, it’s all very disparate and spread out, nothing brings them together into an industry yetto unify a price point, control quality, how it is treated, promote this new sustainable building interior resource to local architects and interior designers, etc.
Matt Morley
Really appreciate how you've described that kind of playmaking role of putting it together piecing the different elements together so that you create what is hopefully going to be a long term project around a sustainable alternative to building with less and less sustainable building materials.
So I think it's got so much merit if if someone wants to read further into the subject if they want to explore the topic a bit deeper. Is there what's uh, is there a recommended resource? Or where would you say we could go to kind of learn a bit more?
Manuel Diaz-Cebrian
Well, I have to tell you actually, I've been researching bamboo, I mean, ideally, in a professional way for the last few years. Because as you know, I'm the director of special projects for Marbella Design.
We gave a talk two years ago to architects and designers in Marbella and we started educating our guests about bamboo there. Many did not know the roof of the airport terminal at Madrid Barajas is made of bamboo for example!
I'm going to Paris in two hours just to see a pavilion that Simon Velez has built made of bamboo. So it's more and more and more that you're seeing this.
Last year, I invited Dr. Pablo van der Lugt to speak at Marbella Design Week, author of the book called ‘Booming Bamboo’ that I recommend to architects and interior designers interested in sustainable interiors or building construction. This is something of a bible in fact. I give a copy to every single person I meet who wants to learn more about the wonders of bamboo!
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